The Return
by KendrixTermina
Summary: "Truly, among the three of them, not a single one had been particularly eager to return to that particular planet." The homeworld trio, before everything else. First impressions are seriously overrated, if not outright deceiving.
1. I (The Flight)

The Return

 _All my friends are heathens, take it slow_

 _Wait for them to as you who you know_

 _Please don't make any sudden moves_

 _You don't know the half of the abuse_

* * *

 _I._

At first, her journey had been a hopeful one.

After an eternity of nothingness and confinement, it was enough of a relief to merely move again, touch again, see again, to feel her hair brush against her face and neck as it floated in the weightlessness of space.

For so long, there had been nothing but nothingness interspersed with short blips of painfully limited contact to the outside world, just a few words or images dumped into the void that had trapped her, to be retrieved later, none of which held any meaning to her.

Throughout all of this, she'd had no face with which to grimace, no hands with which to fend for herself, and no voice with which to scream, her existence so inconsequential as to be easily forgotten, but undeniable to herself if only for the terror, rage and indignity that required for someone to exist feel them; And so she'd clung to them, as her one and only tether to reality, more than anything else, more than any memories of her distant past, any long faded individuals she might have known, or any supposed purpose she might once have had.

And the worst of her fears had been that eventually, even that would fade with time, leaving her a shell that had long since forgotten to be alive, with no means to distinguish herself from the emptiness coming from where her senses should have been;

Pain, she'd decided, was still vastly preferable to nothingness, and if she had to be stuck with one of them, then she would drink that bitter cup with her own hands, lest she forget:

Her name was Lapis Lazuli, and she was not a thing.

In the darkness, the slick and bitter wrath had been the only thing to nourish her soul, and she'd held on to it as if for dear life, held on to the hot and heavy pain even as she had no hope of release, and no eyes from which to let its searing pressure pour out.

Now, as the wide expanse of the universe lay before her, she could not believe the lightness that she felt, paradoxically, from the experience of once again taking up space and projecting out mass; Out here, there was no gravitational field strong enough to pull her down, but she did grow aware of the pull of her own inertia as she accelerated.

Even the very ability to turn her field of vision however she pleased and to decide the angle at which the she looked upon the world felt like an almost surreal level of freedom, and at first, with relief and gratitude still swelling in her chest, she'd turned and twirled in serpentine lines, somersaulting in the void as she sped forward, spreading her arms almost as wide as her wings as her eyes took in the starlight;

It was not just her spirit that felt revitalized, either, and eventually, she would come to consider that the only explanation for how she'd allowed herself such an illusion: For so, so long, she'd experienced the world through a filter of dimness and static, held down not only by her physical prison, but the nasty crack that had limited her already meager means of getting out; She'd had a long, long time to contemplate just how close she had come to being shattered altogether, and far too much to not at least consider that that may in fact have been the more merciful fate;

For a moment, she'd even thought that it would end up sealing her fate after all, even after she'd managed to escape the mirror, that moment in which she'd realized that the state she'd been in might prevent her from making it off planet after all.

But now, everything was crisp and clear again, every motion feeling vivid and real; here she was, among black holes and galaxies, taking in the lights of stars and nebulas, far beyond that unreachable piece of sky that had taunted her for so long, and just for a moment, she had dared to _believe,_ and to hope that maybe, she'd been allowed some respite.

The further she came, the more the Earth faded into the lines of the milky way, a pale blue dot glittering among many distant colored blotches, her torments floating far behind her, until she couldn't even say with certainty which one it was, or if it was even still visible at all; Before long, she'd have left its entire Galaxy behind her, and, at the time, she was sure that she was never going back.

So when she reached the ends of the colossal spiral, she couldn't wait to slip from the binds of its gravity, to float past the last of its silvery stars, through its murky halo of burnt-out dust and dark matter, some of it once part of some long disintegrated stars, some left over from the flaming birth of the universe itself, this world so boundless that it had remained undisturbed ever since, until a passing blue gem grazed them with her watery wings; Her first emotion upon piercing the darkness of the intergalactic medium had been relief, her hardened heart too cautious to treat itself to joy, but, at least, she felt one step closer to being able to wash off the taint of those days, and wore a hesitant smile as the milky way began to shrink to a distinct mass of stars behind her;

It's yellowish, central bar and the long silvery spiral arms could have been considered a thing of beauty, but as far as Lapis was concerned, she was just glad to be rid of it, more than ever now that she could see it as a distinct, single entity, a discreet thing other than just stars, planets and nebulas as they could be found anywhere in the universe.

When she regarded it like this, its form was easy to imbue with disdain, and so she made a deliberate point to to take one last, firm look at it, before turning away decisively, vowing to forget that place and that place's woe.


	2. II (The Void)

_II._

So she'd left her prison behind.

But apart from it, what was there?

Once upon a time, there had been the shimmer of homeworld's many crystal spires, it's palaces, temples and arenas, the whole sphere of it shining bright with the light of civilization; It was a fleeting dream, a smear of memory that she had clung to, as a proof of what had been taken from her, and what might be waiting for her to reclaim, along with her name, her form and her wings, a goal a to strive for, a place to go; She distantly recalled one time she had soared above the coruscant orb, beholding it in a way not many of its citizens were privy to, but that was long, long ago and far, far away, a shred of past so distant she couldn't even say why she'd been sent to fly into orbit that day, or exactly when.

Yet even for one such as herself, who could traverse the void between the worlds with relative ease, the universe was unimaginably enormous and mostly filled with large amounts of nothingness, and it took her a considerable amount of time to cross the blackness between the Galaxies.

It's not like she could have put a number to it, there was nothing out here by which to measure the passage of time, there was even the possibility that her voyage through the blackness did not actually last that long altogether; any internal sense of time she might have had at some point could not possibly have survived her long captivity.

She'd flown into the void with almost a hint of determination in her face, and for a while, she'd managed to hold on to that wave of feeling, but she could not sustain it forever, and out here, there wasn't exactly anything else to inspire further reactions in her; Any passing Galaxies were too far away to appear as anything more than distant splotches of color and light, or single dots even, so the only thing she had for company were her own thoughts, thoughts that would not cease to be filled with the torment of the past just because she forced it down; She had it contained most of the time, but the slightest, mildest thing that reminded her of it, that created a conduit for the memories to climb up, could set it all free, and the more the pressure mounted, the lower the threshold of what constituted a reminder.

She knew that she was not standing still and most certainly not directionless – She'd sighted homeworld's Galaxy and maintained a steady course toward it, but it was so far out that the tiny, greenish dot she'd recognized it as did not seem to grow larger no matter how long she chased after it, like the distance between her and it had not decreased by any significant account

Perhaps, she could have gotten a better estimate of how far along she was by checking if the milky way had likewise receded to such an unremarkable dot behind her, but that would have involved looking back, and that, she could not risk, not now, now when the blackness felt like it was taking on a certain familiarity.

Sure, she was moving, and sure, she had form, sure, she could have spoken if she wanted to, her kind did not even require air to accomplish that, but, even I she'd done that, who would have listened?

Even if she had eyes now, what was there to see? Even if she had hands now, what was there to touch?

As much as she might tell herself that she was surely, certainly going somewhere, she was not quite succeeding in making herself _feel_ that, and there was not much out her to prove her wrong.

All around her was the outermost, emptiest of spaces, the voidest of voids on the naked skin of the universe, so even as her wings beat, even as her hands reached, they encountered no resistance, barely a particle to interact with, let alone cause her to experience any sensation, and certainly no other surface for her to ascertain its solidity, aside from her own physical construct and the small amount of water she'd brought with her.

The arms she'd once spread apart widely just to feel their full span had somehow ended up hugging her own, delicate body, rubbing her upper arm, but it was only a very pale comfort, no confirmation of anything outside herself.

Against all rationality, the old, slick feelings crept up within her again, even though they did not belong to this place, not belong to this time or this situation. But they were, without doubt, there, and they wouldn't be convinced, and, just by being there, they became something that had to be addressed, something to be listened to, something to fertilize her crystallizing doubt.

What if she never made it? What if she'd be struck by some sort of freak occurrence, and die out here, after all she'd survived, her shards floating out her forever, where no one would ever find it? What if she'd picked the wrong Galaxy to fly toward, and her trajectory was, in fact, leading her _away_ from everything she'd ever known? What if she'd end up lingering out here, forever, never finding her way? What if there _was_ no homeworld anymore, what if she'd arrive to find nothing but burnt-out ruins from long ago?

Oh, the very thought of staying like this – out here in this backless, where she could feel nothing and nothing could feel her, she might as well be back in the mirror, where her existence was of no consequence; Or, at least, with the mirror, there would have been some possibility that someone might have taken care of it not working, even if those cruel Earth Gems would likely just shake their heads in annoyance, and toss what remained of her onto some pile of old and broken things;

Or perhaps she had never escaped at all, and everything she'd seen and experienced in the near past was just a feverish illusion, a dream she'd personally constructed to replace a reality that would not respond to her anymore; Maybe this nightmare would go on forever, and she would never reach homeworld, or maybe, this was just the last lights of her mind flickering out;

How believable was it, anyway, that one of the Crystal Gems would be the one to let her go?

It was not like she had any means to prove herself wrong, when she was still as cut-off and deprived as she had ever been.

But even if that were true, it would at least mean that the Crystal Gems would not get any use out o her any more, one way or another.

That she would at least die free, having effectively managed at least one undeniable act of defiance against the cruel, cruel lot that had been thrust upon her, was the only consolation she could muster at this point: She was Lapis Lazuli, and she had broken free of the Earth, be it in mind or in body.

This thought alone was likely all that kept her going on her lonely path through the emptiness.


	3. III (The Inevitable)

III.

After all she had done, felt and gone through, she never ended up making it to homeworld, at least not on her own two wings.

Yeah, all those fantasies she'd had, of finally seeing her home glittering on the horizon, of soaring above the countless spires that coated its surface like the crystalline spikes in a geode, and gently gliding down into the pleasure-gardens of her youth?

Nothing but a nostalgic, sentimental pipe dream.

Instead, reality had ensued:

She'd been spotted by the time she'd approached the outer borders of the Galaxy, and presumably been hailed on all frequencies, before the surveillance guards on duty realized that that the object they had been tracking wasn't any kind of ship or small probe, but a single, individual gem.

Though she'd pieced this together from words that had been exchanged in her presence, all of this had, at first, been taking place without her awareness of it; At the time, she was still floating, still dreaming, still immersed in the fantasies, hopes and memories inside her own world of utter, interrupted solitude;

For longer than she could say, she'd shivered in the dreadful refuge of her own mind – but nonetheless, a refuge it had been: At least there was nothing there that she did not bring with her, at least those were only the devils she knew, and as she'd come to find, there were actually things in this world that this was preferable to.

At first, she dismissed the apprehension she felt building up somewhere in her limbs, telling herself that the moment she caught sight of the small ship approaching her position should have been a joyous one, as it was sign of the civilization she'd been trying to get back to, something to take her back home.

It had to be, for why else had she come all this way?

But this was a deviation from the one, firm idea of her return she'd established in her mind, something that left room for doubt to splinter her conceptions of the future, and without meaning to, just as she was righting herself relative to the ship's entry hatch, she found herself drawing her hands to her slender elbows, moving her legs closer together;

After all, her last interaction with another gem from homeworld had involved one careless heel cracking her, they'd been the fist ones to keep her contained, to extract information from her as she tried to get their attention in her voiceless horror...

Sure, it had been a mix-up, it was all the rebel's fault for causing that whole war and making everyone so afraid that no one would risk to let her lose, she was not meant to have been on the battlefield in the first place, which was probably why she'd assumed to have been one of the rebels in the first place; Though she could be said to possess a lot of raw power, it had been intended for a very different purpose, so she had never really seen herself as 'mighty' or a 'fighter'.

Back on Earth, cornered, frightened and pushed over the edge, she'd managed to put up a fight as she scrambled to defend herself from the rebels whom she thought would surely end her, but she'd never had the will or personality required to wreck destruction; She'd just wanted to go home, and lashed out based on whatever base instincts she'd been reduced to;

That she'd once been considered too dangerous to questioni in person, because of what she might be able to do, especially on a water-filled planet like Earth, had seemed an unfair and mind-boggling thought in the early days of her captivity, yet more proof of how perverse and deranged the rebels were and how all the pain she'd been put through was ultimately their fault, but now, as that prophecy had fulfilled itself when she'd turned her powers against the rebels, she felt no longer so certain about her innocence.

Would she be listened to now? What if they chose to poof her, just out of precaution, and it led to her being trapped again, after she'd come all of this way for nothing?

Nervously hovering in place, she made no move to resist as the spaceship drew closer, but didn't make any move on her own, either; Maybe she'd been hesitant, or, maybe she'd simply feared that it would be misconstrued as an attack; Most likely, her idleness may have been misunderstood either way, because she hadn't been making any move to come closer, but, all things considered, the scariest possibility was that there had been no misunderstanding at all...

She expected the entry hatch to open any moment; Instead, whoever was in charge of the ship engaged a large, green tractor beam, and just like that, she was frozen in position, barely capable of moving her eyeballs, or to produce a sound as she startled; yet even then, she still tried to tell herself that it was probably just a precaution, or, perhaps the result of some well-intentioned assumption that she couldn't get to the hatch on her own; Did it make a difference? She'd be moving to its position one way or another, and then, the hatch would surely, finally, mercifully open – sure, they must have registered her moving, and realized that she'd stopped of her own free will, that she wasn't an enemy, but at that point it was already beginning to dawn on her that her homeward journey might not quite turn out the way she wanted it to.

But it was when she saw the inside of the ship that she fully realized that something was really wrong: There was not a thing inside that she recognized, none of the technology, none of the structures; The ship's entrance revealed a tangled, surreal image of tubes, sharp lines and right answers, rudimentarily distinguishable as a circular room with a bunch of consoles on the walls and several corridors leading elsewhere; the walls that, in her day, would have been filled with mosaics, were stark and barren except for two horizontal lines filled up with triangles and one large insignia she didn't exactly recognize.

The most disconcerting thing, however, was the crew. Not their looks or their getup, or even the strange, two-pronged weapons they were warily pointing her way, but its size: Back when Lapis left for earth, a heavy cruiser this size would have required a sizable crew to direct and maintain, but when the tractor beam dissipated to deposit her in a disorderly heap on the floor, the blue gem was received by as little as two individuals, standing almost forlornly in the oblong ellipsoid hall.

Instead of the flowing gowns, robes and leotards she had expected, the pair wore dark, form-fitting attires distinguished as uniforms by the identical V-shaped necklines and overall designs, with only some mild variations between the two distinct gems, and, of course, their color schemes that corresponded with those of their wearers.

The only thing about them that was remotely familiar was the insignia positioned on their chests, which identified them as subordinates of Yellow Diamond, supreme commander of warfare and technology; At last some things seemed eternal.

As foreign as everything about them seemed, the crew of the patrol ship were, in fact, gems:

Lapis recognized them as a Nephrite and a Hematite, both slightly taller than her, eying her with stern, wary faces and drawn, sparking weapons.

It was the Nephrite, whose green-and-black uniform covered everything from her neckline down, but revealed her round gemstone at her sternum, who spoke first, the first words has heard in a very long time: "Identify yourself!"

Shaken as she was, she pulled herself together, and spat her declaration in their faces:

"I am Lapis Lazuli and... I have returned home!"

"Which Lapis Lazuli?"

And that was only the first of many questions that hailed down upon her: Where had she come from? What was she doing here? On whose authorization? Why wasn't she arriving by warp pad or spaceship? Was she aware that she'd triggered the alarms of the sky trenches? - Sky Trenches? - Sure! The empire had made many enemies in its time, none of which had managed to stand up to it for long, of course, but, they could not possibly afford to leave its borders unguarded, not in these dark days, and it would not do to sabotage their patrolling efforts with unauthorized flights...

In the meantime, the Hematite had rushed over to one of the control numbers, and, by the looks of it, imputed her serial numbers. "Impossible. This says she was reported missing over six thousand years ago, presumably lost at the very beginning of... the war for Earth."

Lapis did not fail to notice how both their expressions darkened further when the name of the planet was mentioned.

"But that could as well confirm her story, couldn't it, Earth...? Does her gem location match up with that missing gem?"

"Where is it, anyway? Check on her back."

Weapon still drawn demonstratively, the Nephrite stepped toward her with a swift, purposeful stride, closing the distance faster than Lapis was comfortable with; Before she could even react, the olive-green gem had grabbed her shoulder in a nonchalant, businesslike fashion, and twisted her delicate body forward to take one ascertaining glance.

"Would you look at this! It does match!"

Almost instantly, Lapis recoiled, wresting her arm from the other gem's grasp and defensively positioning one of her water wings between herself and the patrol ship's navigator.

The Nephrite was unimpressed, merely narrowing her eyes in annoyance like she didn't have anything to fear, a sentiment that she most likely attributed to the weapon she'd swiftly pointed in Lapis' direction as a reaction to her motions. "Dispel your weapon, will you? I really suggest you behave until all of this is sorted out. If you really came from Earth, then you have quite a lot to answer for! … Hematite?"

"I still maintain that it's impossible. Gems should have been wiped out on Earth at the end of the war. Everybody knows this! The gem she claims to be is presumed to have been shattered over six thousand years ago..."

Six thousand years.

Six. **Thousand**. Years.

There it was, with one last, merciless blow, the wrecking ball that made all her hopes and preconceptions shatter to pieces.

It was not a yielding to the Nephrite's order, but her own shock and resignation that made her hydrokinesis dissipate, leading the water she'd been controlling for flight to splatter down on both the floor and Lapis' own hair and garments.

The ship's occupants were still talking even now, something about this being 'clearly outside their jurisdiction', an 'living relic from Era One', and the need to contact homeworld; They continued to talk about her like some curious yet bothersome object, as if she wasn't even in the room.

One way or another, she was too dizzy to even try to follow or process what they were saying; She had gotten her answer, in about all ways that mattered.

Already on her knees, she led her hands sink, her head hang, and her entire posture droop ever further.

It's not like the length of time surprised her;

She was quite aware that she had been locked aware for an unbearable amount of time, that was the whole point; But that she hadn't considered was that time would have passed for everyone else, too. This explained everything, of course: The advanced ship, the new uniforms, the unfamiliar sigils, and the cold welcome...

She'd been dead to this world for longer than she'd been alive before that; Most of her existence had been spent in torment, and whatever dim hopes she'd had left pertained to a world that was now inaccessible to her, buried beneath years and years of change and process.

When Nephrite and Hematite had finished their discourse and turned to lead her away, Lapis Lazuli didn't put up the slightest bit of resistance.

One last vestige of Lapis' aristocratic status remained with her: Out of the chambers the two had available on their ship, they allotted her the largest one they had, not that it meant much; It was one of those measures that were put into all kinds of ships or structures in case of high-ranking visitors, but mostly served a symbolical function to always remind the underlings working there of the presence of their superiors and the eminence of the hierarchy; On an ordinary warship like this one, the odds of an elite actually showing up were slim, so that function was considered to be sufficiently fulfilled by a not particularly large, triangular room that seemed designed mainly to inspire awe in those who had to keep it in usable condition: Most attention had been given to its very high ceiling, and the carvings on both it and one of the walls, both of which were more ornate version of the insignia she'd seen in the central room – the presence of distinct, symmetrical bits of white, blue and yellow led Lapis to suspect that this might be the modern version of the diamond authority symbol, but that couldn't be right: What about Pink Diamond? Where washer emblem?

She couldn't possibly have been destroyed, could she?

Like any other gem under homeworld's authority, Lapis Lazuli had been brought up to see the Diamonds as eternal, flawless beings, unquestionable god-queens that walked the earth; There was a time where the very idea that one of them could possibly fall would have seemed preposterous to her. But even that felt distant now. What had the Diamonds ever really done for her? How perfect could they be if their infallible rule allowed for someone to be trapped and interrogated for centuries without any chance of speaking for herself?

In any case, their symbol did not bring Lapis any comfort, and neither did anything else in the room: Not the round, soft piece of furniture in the center of the room, not large panoramic window composed of triangular glass panels that took up a second wall, not the closed door on the third, nor the computer terminals next to it.

She had made some attempts to use these, but quickly given up when she realized that they were nothing like the ones she'd seen in her own day. She had half a mind to summon her wings and smash the window, but the last thing she wanted was to be back out there in the blackness, this time truly with nowhere to go.

So all she could do was lie in the room's center and hide her face in the arms she had crossed and placed before her, lamenting her fate.

The fabric beneath her bare arms and feet was indeed made of a fine, lustrous material becoming of aristocracy, its frivolity the only use it could have for beings that barely required comforts, but it was not a material whose characteristic sensation she would have recognized, perhaps some new invention or a rare novelty taken from one of the many worlds the empire had newly conquered in her absence.

It did little to maintain the illusion that this room was anything other than a gilded cage, a temporary receptacle for her to be placed in until they decided what to do with her, something to contain the suspicious existence that had turned up on their scanners -

The ship's small crew certainly did nothing to make her feel welcome, nor did they show her any affirmation that they recognized her to be on their side – They did not show her anything, not even their faces for the most part, except for the one time early on when the Hematite had turned up to inform her that they had contacted their superiors and received orders to escort her all the way back to the homeworld itself.

The last she saw the Hematite's gray face, insofar as it wasn't obscured by her long, raven hair, it had been rather unreadable, and certainly not been displaying anything like sympathy -

With rising dread, Lapis realized that she would likely be interrogated. Again. By her own people, whom she had committed no actual infringement against.

Would she again be assumed to be guilty?

Would history repeat itself?

Sure, this time, she had her wings, she had arms and legs to defend herself with and a tongue with which to speak her truth and affirm her name and rights, but, what difference was it going to make?

While there may have been a vestige of a possibility that she may be found innocent and identified as who she claimed to be, that thought barely crossed her mind, and did not much to convince her – when had things ever turn out in her favor? By what reason or experience could she possibly trust in that?

She might be out of the mirror, but she felt like nothing had changed.

She was still trapped, still silent, even on her way to the place she had struggled so hard to get back to; She was a prisoner even here, the restraints on her body might be broken, but the chains on her heart had grown stronger than ever, and with one deep, long sigh of resignation, she realized that she would drag them with her wherever she went.

And that's how she eventually returned to homeworld, hugging her knees, listlessly gazing out of the window of a small patrol ship as it docked into an orbital space station, looking down at a planet made out of spine-like towers and hollow scaffolds that did not even resemble the ocean of spires from her memories.

For so long, Lapis Lazuli had languished for the day she'd return here, but now that she was in fact looking down at the venerable cradle of her civilization, she felt nothing but terror.

Then, suddenly, something startled her upright.

Amid the usual low hums of the ship, there was a new noise, a quick session of metallic clangs that seemed to be rapidly advancing in her direction.

Lapis drew her extremities as closely to to her torso as they would go, pressed her forehead down on her knees, and begged any deity who would listen to let her be mistaken, to let this have been some random mechanical parts, and not headed toward her position at all.

But the universe, as usual, had no mercy for the wicked, and soon, she couldn't fight off the realization that the clangs were accompanied by the sound of steps, and loud voices flaring up – Lapis couldn't tell with certainty if it was the Nephrite or the Hematite, but she immediately realized that there was another sound that couldn't possibly have belonged to either of them: A shrill, high-pitched sound that grated on her ears even before it became gradually distinguishable as a loud, garish nasal voice.

The blue gem froze. A newcomer, most likely just warped over from the planet.

They were coming to take her away.

"...are you positive that she said 'Earth'?" she heard the new gem inquire, confirming her suspicions.

Whoever she was talking with supplied an answer at a more appropriate volume that made her exact words harder to decipher.

By now Lapis had caught onto the fact that it was the Hematite, who hadn't believed her words to begin with. Whatever she'd said, she didn't sound pleased; Perhaps, she was displeased to have been recalled from her mission because of some preposterous claim, or, she might have been tired of dealing with whoever was in her company, but one way or another, their approach did not bode well for Lapis at all; She had not seen her face yet, but she was already thoroughly certain that she couldn't stand whatever little gremlin the others had brought aboard;

Even if she hadn't been the harbinger of whatever unpleasant fate was soon to befall Lapis, she couldn't stand the way that gem talked, the smug, self-important tone, her swotty exaltation of whatever meagre menial task she was supposed to do, the zealous obedience that shone through in the perverse eagerness of her arguments:

"That is important, you know! There have been some serious interruptions to my mission, and this person might be the I want to know for sure that she's gonna be useful before I waste my time with this. Unlike you, I have a real responsibility to this empire, you know. Our troops are dependingon this geoweapon!"

Here they go again, Lapis thought, here they are again, talking about her like she's something to be harnessed, speaking of her like she's some sort of thing.

And already, she felt herself resigning herself to the fact that she would be the next target for this gem's big-headed venting.

"Waste your time? Your responsibility?" Hematite replied, "On whose Authority are you even claiming her? I was under the impression that you're amaintenance technician, not the Inquisition, and whatever her story is, she is still one of Blue Diamond's aristocrats. Even if you're working in a mission related to Earth, I don't see how she is in any way under your jurisdiction. We should just hand her over to Blue Diamond's goons and be done with it, I for my part do not want to be held responsible for this."

"Here. Look! This is a missive from my supervisor. See that down here? That's a level-3 priority code, issued by Yellow Diamond herself. Now, please, let me do my job, unless you want to repeat your complaints to the Diamond Line. Do you want me to take this off your hands or not?"

"Alright, alright! Here she is! I trust you know how to open the door yourself, technician."

Lapis was certain that she heard Hematite turn on her heels and march away, her barely constrained exasperation apparent in the sound of her stride.

The blue gem tensed up, bracing herself for the inevitable opening of the door.

What she didn't expect was for the swishing sound to delay itself, leaving her in complete, terrifying silence, until eventually, when she was certain that Hematite could not have been anywhere in the vicinity of the room anymore, the shrill voice returned alongside the jarring clang of metal on metal:

"Have fun on patrol-duty, you Clods!"


	4. IV (The Machine)

_IV._

Slumped forward at what, by Earth standards, might have been described as a desk with a minimalistic, raygun-gothic-esque design, Lapis did not raise her eyes to meet the small green gem that was now increasingly discernible as her _captor,_ an act that was borne out of equal parts of resignation, dread and also, resentment;

At this point, this gesture was the only act of defiance that was left to her anymore.

Elbows propped up on the table before her, hands holding on to her elbows, she could do nothing but tremble in apprehension, and only her grit teeth betrayed the rage and frustration that ravaged her small, delicate form from the inside.

An inversion to her previous place of holding, this place required a stretch of the imagination to be seen as anything _but_ a prison cell, gray, stark, and featureless save for a horizontal line of interlocking triangles engraved upon the walls and a simplistic version of the modern Diamond Authority emblem.

What little there was to be found in the room behind her was made up of blocky, sharp angular shapes, and melded to the walls, being composed of the same, anthrazite-grey material, not that there was much beyond a box-like desk held up by walls that surrounded her legs under the table, flaring out downward in a triangular manner; As it was also melded to the floor, the position of the small stool she was sitting on could not be adjusted; It was barely more than a rectangular block to sit on, really, and its sharp edges dug into her skin, which did not cause a gem serious discomfort, but was enough to subliminally contribute to her irritation.

The only other piece of furniture was a raised portion of floor next to the back wall, which could have been interpreted as a couch or a cot, or perhaps a pedestal, and it was on the wall above it that the triangular sigils of the gem matriarchs were placed; Opposite to it was the desk, and around it, a glimmering, yellowish force field stretching from the edges of the desk to the walls in the shape of an upside-down 'U', effectively sealing off everything behind it into its own, cube-shaped room.

Beyond the forcefield, there was a desk symmetrical to the one in the room, with a ridge of forcefield emitters having been placed exactly in the middle of the resulting combined rectangular table, and behind that, a larger room could be glimpsed, one that was lined with screens, consoles, shelves containing various archived data storage devices, a larger, more elaborate desk in the center of the room, which was fitted with computer consoles, and a second sealed-of portion much like the one Lapis currently sat in, but was unoccupied as far as she could tell.

More ominous in purpose were the various discernible hatches embedded into the floor, which appeared like they allowed for miscellaneous devices to be summoned into the room, and, after all that could be deduced about the purpose of this... office, there could be little doubt that whatever was under there was intended for more...extensive interrogation techniques.

One of them might even be something like a new and improved futuristic version of the mirror she'd been trapped in, which in itself was enough to make her stay here nightmarish.

But even without that looming threat, even with it relatively far-fetched, it was still the same repetition of that same situation with that same, unavoidable inevitability forced upon her back; It was that same, complete deprivation of all will, individuality and personhood that broke her; that, and the certainty that was sinking in like an old, familiar rusty blade:

The realization that she had never escaped, not truly, not really; All the time she thought she was escaping, she was merely running back into the arms of her captors, rushing to take it back like an old, ditched lover, because she was still too weak not to confuse love with need, even though she should have really had the awareness that she ought to be more with this, that had no reason to suffer any more indignities, all of them be damned?

But yet, here she was, ostensibly for a reason.

And with that being apparent, how was she to look at herself, what was she to think of seeing herself being _this_ , doing _this_ , just a puppet to be used, exploited and locked away when she wasn't needed anymore, when she used to be something, someone, _somebody_ , how could she not feel the need to detach herself from the pathetic thing she was seeing? How could she not recognize this as weakness, how could she not loathe the sight?

What was hell, if not pain without end?

If there was an end, or a purpose, one could resolve oneself to endure, to reach an end, to hold out until some mystical faraway day; But without it, everything was senseless, and now Lapis knew that her torment would never end: She might be able to break away from a mirror, but she had no way of breaking away from _herself._

Her self was the one thing she'd be forced to drag behind her wherever she went...

How could she ever be okay with being this insignificant heap of misery when she was taunted by the distant memories of when she had a life, too faded to hold onto, and yet, too apparent to be ignored; Just the mere knowledge that she had once been more than this was enough to drive her mad:

It would be one thing if she'd never known any different, but she'd lived in a world whose crystal spires had still been filled with dance and music, what it was like to be _light_ , to have a _voice_ , what it had meant to be _Lapis Lazuli_ , and she did not know just how, in this world or any other, she was supposed to let go of this dream.

Whatever scar tissue might have formed over the wounds and bruises of her heart had sunk in and burst open and lay bare, raw and open, obediently lying still, almost as if waiting for newer blows to strike, telling both herself and the universe that she got it:

Alright, alright, no more hopes, no more expectations. Mind, stop thinking, heart, stop feeling, will, stop wanting...

Maybe if she managed to yield completely, or failing that, to suppress all of her being to the tiniest flutter, she would be able to bear the bizarre kind of advanced shackling that her existence had become;

Maybe then, she could bear to be talked about like a thing without feeling like her insides were fleeing from each other in revulsion;

But as of now, the memories of all she used to be shrieked in protest of every crossed boundary she tolerated, and screeched in mourning every bit of dignity she renounced with what little was left of her own 'free' will, and she could not help but rage that it wasn't fair.

She hadn't wanted to be here.

They had made her, yanked her, dragged her -

The green one, the small technician, had come and declared to her that she was to answer her questions, and that she was to accompany her down to the planet to do so.

"You know that was a direct order from Yellow Diamond, do you?"

Distantly, Lapis had observed that if she'd heard correctly earlier, Yellow Diamond's personal involvement boiled down to asking that this mission be expedited when it was first scheduled and commissioned, likely long before anyone in particular was assigned to it; The technician was likely just stretching definitions to make her assignment sound more important.

But regardless of her thoughts, the blue gem's body hadn't budged.

"You are _to come with me_ , is what I'm saying.", the technician had repeated, slower and with a deliberately stretched intonation, as if talking down to an imbecile. "You have to _get up_. For an _important mission_. That means _right_ _now_."

Instead of turning to get up, Lapis had grit her teeth, and turned her face back to the window.

Now she had lost deniability.

Bringing an arm to her face, the little technician had sighed deeply, and with one step backwards, the new arrival had stepped past the door-frame, narrowing her eyes as the door slid closed.

The next time it opened, it revealed the ship's crew, both of them brandishing the two-pronged yellow weapons she'd seen them use earlier.

She didn't have a choice, and now, they had a charge to file against her, insubordination at the very least, and any pretense they had of respecting Lapis' former status had been forfeit.

Who knows, perhaps they had been secretly waiting for a legitimate, sanctioned chance to manhandle an elite, and she was just unlucky enough to become the vessel for every shred of envy they'd ever held.

Or maybe that was a simpler, more understandable explanation to avoid the conclusion that they simply did not care, and felt nothing but professional detachment as they callously pinned her to the ground like the cogwheels of a well-oiled machine, and then made her get up on their terms, their weapons crossed in front of her neck, ready to strike her at a moment's notice.

As she was escorted out, she heard the technician complaining, making a pretense of giving orders after the fighting had already been taken care of: "Hey, careful with the destabilizers, don't dissipate her form if you can help it, I need her to _talk_!"

The certainty of just _what_ exact means would be used to make her 'talk' if her form were to be dissipated now poisoned her heart like a sliver of ice, and transformed these 'destabilizers' that the navigator and her weapons officer wielded into something far more dangerous than just drawn weapons, but it did not seem like they really took notice of the fact that Lapis' struggling had ceased; Their hand grips on her shoulders did not ease, their weapons remained at her neck, and behind them, the technician barked something about which facilities she had been assigned for what she simply referred to as ' the task'.

The other two did not show much in terms of compassion, either; Their only concern was to be done with this deviation from their plans, to be done with her, and done with that snotty technician.

Had homeworld been different in the past, or had she merely romanticed the past in her desperation for some illusion to cling to? Lapis Lazuli honestly couldn't say; She couldn't find anything in her memory that would have been indicative, at least not from _before_.

But contrasted with the mercy she'd been shown on Earth, at that, from one of those accused rebels that cared nothing for their own kind, this felt like an indignity she should not have had to suffer, and before she knew it, she'd been thrown in this... this _dungeon_ , having to watch as the technician, who had the gall to refer to it as simply an 'office', slowly and meticulously went about her work, taking her sweet time to turn on various devices, sort through the archive files and review some measurements and recordings taken from her equipment, getting technological-looking objects out of drawers and spreading them out on the available work spaces, and generally not appearing like she would pay Lapis any mind until she'd reached the point in her activities where she deemed her presence to be required...

Which was the whole reason why she had been brought here, instead of anywhere else: Because the small technician had a _mission_ that required _information_ and hat gotten the _clearance_ from her superiors to _claim her_ which no-one has been able to protest because her _mission_ had a _priority code._

This wasn't even about anything she'd done; All of this, everything that had been done to her so far was all about this _job_ that this little green gnome had to do on _Earth_ of all places.

Right – this was all _her_ fault.

Lapis had found her eerie pretty much from the first time she'd laid eyes on her, but here, as she was preparing for her interrogation and thereby waltzing around in front of her, she had her first real chance to get a good look at the other gem, and come to name what exactly was so off-putting about her;

In general, gems tended to vary significantly more in size and coloration than, say, humans, and there were several very common and not-so-common types of gems that would have had a smaller sort of stature – indeed, Lapis herself wasn't exactly on the large end of the spectrum – but she'd never seen anything quite like this specimen back in her own day; she could only speculate that the landslide advance of technology had necessitated a special type of personel to handle it, but surely, that could not explain everything; There had been technicians back in 'Era 1' as well - this being the expression which had apparently become the established term for the days before the war – and even then, it had been customary for them to have somewhat disproportionately sized heads ostensibly meant to contain all that engineering knowledge; as technicians were not as often on display or seen as a matter of prestige to the extent that the empire's troops were, the uniforms hadn't even changed as much as the ones for the troops; What her most recent jailor was wearing did adhere to the same basic design as what she'd seen on the spaceship crew, a sleeveless bodysuit with Yellow Diamond's insignia embedded in the neckline, but there was something of the older, leotard-like designs left in the color distribution, with the fabric on her lower torso being a somewhat greenish black whereas the part on her legs and chest were a more saturated chlorophyll green aside from the further yellow diamond-shapes on her knees; She was also sporting a lightly-tinted visor that covered most of her upper face from the nose upward, again, not unusual or inexpedient for someone of her occupation...

But never has she seen one so spindly, so frail-looking, with so little actual mass to her neck, torso and forelimbs; Even other smaller gems would generally be stockier than that, this one looked like it should be impossible for her to keep her balance, like she should be breaking apart from the simple act of swinging around those heavy, flared-out lower limbs –

That is, until Lapis realized that they weren't even limbs, and that, upon closer inspection, what she'd assumed to be her fingers wasn't even connected to her arms, but rather floated in their general vincinity; Their color was barely distinct from that of her uniform, but they were robotic in nature, not much unlike some of the things she'd pulled from the shelves and briefly fiddled with.

She'd never seen anything like it; Nothing like this had ever existed anywhere on the homeworld she had known, not would it have been allowed.

Lapis had no way of knowing whether those things were some kind of newfangled tools necessary to operate all these crazy new technology, or if the green gem was in fact _part-machine_ , but it wouldn't be surprising at all – even her voice and mannerisms seemed stiff, mechanistic and robotic, though the earlier petty outburst of harsh language she'd witnessed on the ship suggested that at least some of her was just light and stone like the rest of them, not that it did much to endear her: All it meant was that somewhere under that methodical surface, there was a pompous irascible twat.

All in all, Lapis could only see the younger gem as a living embodiment of the cold, mechanical, sterile and above all capricious place that seemed to have replaced her home, and as such, she could do nothing but hate the sight of her;

At the time, she didn't to take note of any traits that might have distinguished the small technician as an individual, rather absorbing them as parts of a whole, as a side effect to this terrible scene burning itself into her memory: She couldn't ever forget the particularly bright lime-green of both her skin and gemstone, it's triangular cut and slightly rounded surface, or how it had been embedded in the center of her forehead; She couldn't erase her petite yet curvy build with somewhat pronounced shoulders, her diminutive, triangular chin, the oblong oval shape of her face, or the small, button-like upturned nose and distinctive shaped upper lip that distinguished it, nor the cold, unreadable green eyes that were usually narrowed in thought, or her medium-short, springy yellow-green hair that was styled into an almost flawless tetrahedron to the point that one might think it was some hat or metal protrusion as well if weren't for the two small bangs framing her cheeks.

If there was anything to her beyond being homeworld's useful little drone, then Lapis didn't care to know;

As far as she was concerned, she'd done nothing to merit a second glance;

In all the time she'd been here, she had barely looked at Lapis aside from a few confirmatory wary glances at the beginning, her full attention fixated on the screens and machines she was created to maintain; She worked swiftly and in silence apart from the occasional low muttering that didn't make her any less off-putting, her face framed by the eerie light of the screens, consumed by their contents like they were all that mattered to her in the entire world;

That there was someone else here suffering did not seem to be any of her concern.

She must be a self-absorbed, limited little thing, Lapis thought, fanatically invested in whatever narrow little niche of the world she'd been given, and she despised having to look upon her; Not that there was anything about this hopeless, senseless situation that she didn't wish away.

The technician's 'fingers', it seemed, were capable of assembling themselves into a transparent green holo-screen that functioned as a personal computer terminal, containing, presumably among other things, some sort of personal log, and, to add insult to injury, the blue gem had to endure her speaking into it like she was all alone, once more, speaking about her like she was a thing; She ought to be numb to it by now, but she wasn't, and she found herself torn between feeling that she ought to be and being disgusted at herself for ever considering that thought; For it would made her no better than her tormentors, no better than that unfeeling little robot (literal or figurative), that soulless little doll just doing whatever she was told...

But was she any different?

Did Lapis have any right to claim that, as she sat here, hanging her head in silence until the technician would decide that she had need of her?

After she'd obediently come back here to... what? Receive new orders? Obviously, she hadn't wanted to be captured, essentially, there was nowhere else she could have gone, but what she seriously been expecting to happen with her after she arrived here, if things _hadn't_ turn sour, if she'd been received by members of her own, Blue Diamond faction perhaps, or otherwise by gems that would have greeted her as one of her own?

If she had, essentially, smoothly transitioned back into her native society?

What if the obnoxious green gem _hadn't_ 'claimed her'? Wouldn't she just have been debriefed in only a vaguely less hostile manner, and then assigned to another facility or task, possibly without much of a chance to recover or adapt to this strange new version of homeworld? Wouldn't she have been waiting for new orders, a new role to be given, to play out as just as much as little faithful performer as her current captor, and the two who had brought her here, they too concerned with little else than their specific tasks? Didn't she know it to be true that she'd find herself on another assignment to a bizarre, far-out colony site, like the one that got her into all this mess to begin with, and that she would be expected to _function_ as if nothing had happened?

Back then, she would have thought nothing of it, but now, as she was the one faced with that situation, she couldn't help but find it cruel.

As much as she wanted to believe that the perfect, beautiful home she had wanted to return to had really existed, even the memories she'd clung so with such intensity didn't contain the means to prove her wrong:

The return she had so badly wanted to happen, the homecoming she'd spent all this time feeling deprived of, had already taken place, and this was it.

This was homeworld; This, and no other place.

She'd been so consumed with her feelings that she hadn't realized that they'd likely warped down to the planet: This here, this right here, this was her homecoming, and there was no use in deceiving herself into thinking otherwise;

Homeworld may have changed in some ways, but its society had _always_ been heavily stratified;

Aristocrats didn't speak to lowly workers, Soldiers didn't discuss war with servants, and rulers were not concerned with the thoughts of technicians; They were _made_ to be obedient, no wonder that no one had really been concerned when one of them had disappeared, no surprise that none of them was ever concerned with anything other than their own, defined purpose, and hardly a miracle that a place lead by values like those would end up deteriorating into the one she saw now.

Each and every one of them was designed to be a little, interchangeable part in a great, unfathomable machine that reached farther with every years;

Never would it have been possible to see a sight like the one she'd beholden on earth, an aristocrat being the consort of a simple footsoldier, Pearls speaking on equal footing with Quartzes, Fusions living peaceful lives; All of this would have been as strange as to see her, with the status she had once possessed, living under the same roof as this puny cogwheel of a technician; And with which right did she claim to have been any less of a cogwheel herself, albeit one that was wreathed in pretty robes and left to perform in shiny spires?

Giving in to resignation, Lapis Lazuli found herself faced with the certainty that she was not merely trapped again, but that any freedom she had ever possessed at all had been purely illusory.

Her only comfort now was the relative silence that surrounded her, the glimmer of the force field as a barrier that, at least for now, was not likely to be breached – but even that was not left to her for very long;

The technician, as it appeared, was ready, and Lapis already knew that there was no escape from the nearing steps of her mechanical feet, nor from the scrutinizing, analytical fixation of her dispassionate glance.


	5. V (The Interrogation)

_V._

 _Log date 5-04-8, Facet zero, the Capital. This is Peridot._

 _As I previously detailed, I have confirmed once and for all that the previous equipment failures associated with a routine status checkup on the derelict former colony world known as 'Earth' were, without doubt, the result of deliberate sabotage, presumably by previously unknown survivors of the Earth rebellion;_

 _For the purpose of assessing of the scope of additional measures necessary, I requested the assistance of the only available witness besides myself, an Era I Lapis Lazuli who was recovered from the border region of the principal Galaxy's halo, and, according to her own statements, claims to be Facet-1WU, Cut 77c, a gem that went missing over 6000 years ago at the beginnings of the Earth war._

 _Her claim seems to be supported by what the records state about her weapon and gem placement, and compounded by a lack of reports of other missing Lapis Lazulis that would fit her description; If that is true, that would make her he only gem besides myself to have been the planet in the recent past, and therefore, a prime source of information about the previously unknown opposition I have encountered in my attempts to remotely access the facilities on Earth._

 _Because of this, she has been temporarily assigned to my mission in accordance to my previous request, and transferred to local facility A7-B, where I am to conduct her debriefing, extract the necessary information and report back for further measures._

 _A report of the most relevant results, as well as a full recording of the witness' testimony will be appended to this file shortly. Peridot out._

Holding her finger-screen in Lapis' directions, as if the words she had recorded were meant to inform _her,_ too, the green Gem used the one floating 'finger' that hadn't taken part in projecting the screen to press a button on her personal computer Terminal, perhaps initiating the recording.

Then, the technician, who had so far been standing about a long step away from the forcefield, went to sit down in the rectangular stool opposite to her prisoner's, using her remaining, non-screen hand to hold onto the table and balance herself while doing so.

She sat cross-legged, and thus produced a slight, metallic sound as her mechanical limbs made contact with each other and the material she was sitting on, but the green gem seemed so used to this that she completely failed to react to it, not even in an abashed or self-conscious way – She did not even seem to register it anymore, like it was completely normal to her, indeed suggesting that, for whatever reasons, she had no choice but to drag these things with her wherever she went.

"As you've probably noticed, my name is Peridot, and as of today, you have been assigned to my mission as an informant. " she introduced while pointing her screen in Lapis' direction, presenting a copy of what appeared to be her personnel file and a missive by her superior, before willing the screen to dissipate back into her 'fingers'.

"Given the circumstances of your capture, your former status and the fact that all available records and any subsequent checks seem to confirm or at least line up with what you have been claiming, the higher ups seem willing to overlook your earlier insubordination and provide you with a chance to redeem yourself; If you perform on this mission as required, you will be shown mercy, sent to go back to your duties without further disciplinary actions, and allowed to be of further use to the Diamonds.

Do you understand?"

"..."

The blue gem listened silently, eyes still downcast, not a glimmer of a reaction visible on her features.

"So please, do not make any sudden moves, summon your weapon, or otherwise do anything else that could be misconstrued as further insubordination.

This doesn't have to be an interrogation; In fact, I implore you to consider that we are in urgent need of your cooperation, and would prefer to get the fullest possible use out of your capabilities.

You may not be aware of it, but in your absence, empire has been facing desperate times; In these days of increasingly widespread resource shortages, it is imperative that we all do the will of the Diamonds to the best of our capacity.

In order to keep our shipyards running, to guarantee future generations the best possible production we can manage under these circumstances, and, of course, most importantly, to let the will of the Diamonds be done, is is imperative that we annex more planets and capture more resources and potential colony sites, and for that, our armies are in need of geoweapons like the one we intend to manufacture on Earth.

I'm aware that they were not around in your day, so that they are formidable, planet-sized artificial creatures, and that the handful already under the command of my Diamond's forces have done great contributions to the expansion of our empire.

But their production is a delicate process intensive in both time and resources that we cannot afford to see disrupted; The one we are on Earth has been incubating for over 5000 years, that could all be lost time if we do not act swiftly..."

As they were concealed under her bangs, Lapis could not deny herself from rolling her eyes, unable to further follow her captor's ramblings any longer. It seemed she had now gone from the usual, rehearsed Diamond Authority redderick to the sort of technobabble about 'potential' and 'resources' that only a Peridot could possibly care about.

Her narrow, analytical green eyes had come alive somewhat, there was a light shining in them now, still restrained but there, something that the blue gem chose to classify as zeal or malicious glee, but might as well have been seen as passion and sincerity, that is, if she had believed the little green engineer to be capable of that.

"Listen, I... I am Lapis Lazuli, and..."

And so what? What did they care? What would that even mean to them?

What did it even mean, at all, anymore?

" _Yes, I am aware of that. You can assume that I have read my assignment files."_ the technician quipped, as if even the possible insinuation that she hadn't had crucially annoyed her.

"Speaking of records – as you, you will be given access to all related logs suitable for your clearance level. Please tell us if you recognize anything in this chain of events."

With a swiping motion of her hands, one of the larger screens behind her activated remotely, displaying her recordings with more volume and clarity than her personal fingerscreens could, though those were evidently what the provided audio files had originally been recorded on.

Disgusted at the notion of complying, yet too intimidated for defiance, Lapis staid still as the room filled with just about the last: Yet More of the little gem's grating voice, talking to herself like the ether somehow had reasons to be interested, demanding Lapis' attention just by existing and being hard to ignore;

Wearily, Lapis observed that this technician must really like the sound of her own voice.

 _Log Date 2 2 7, Facet Zero, the Capital. This is Peridot, Facet-2F5L Cut-5XG, tertiary attribute of technical subdivision Alpha-CW-zero one, junior adjutant from the detachment under Peridot 1D14 Cut-Y73. Reporting in from robotics facility 478-C in the B-wing of complex Delta. I will be taking over both the execution and documentation of assignment #2 2 6 Four-Zero-Dash- Zeta as described in the related task management files, as well as the maintenance and operation of all assigned facilities and machinery. As the primary warp address of the relevant planet has not proven responsive, I have been authorized to conduct the mission by means of an remotely operated surveillance droid in accordance with my personal suggestion in the initial briefing, see briefing protocol 2 2 7- 08 for division CW01._

 _This is projected to be an uneventful routine checkup._

…

 _Log Date 2 2 7, Addendum. Despite my ongoing efforts to recalibrate the signal, we have still not restored contact with the Redeye drone ship, nor received any telemetry in it as of T plus 1800. While the channels will remain open as of further, we may have to assume that the ship has been lost._

 _To avoid further in-transit losses, I suggest that we attempt to access the planet by warp, and for that purpose, request the deployment of a batch of Flask Robonoids._

 _Refer to the detailed systems and sensor logs contained in repor to ascertain that both the recalibration efforts and scans for ion storms, gamma bursts and other sources of interference have been carried out according to procedure._

…

 _Log Date: 3 1 2_. _This is Peridot, performing Earth hub maintenance check._ _Warp repair a success. All 79 flask robonoids deployed and accounted for. Preparing to locate and manually reactivate_ _Kindergar_ _—_

(the monotone drone of the tapes was briefly interrupted by a minor sound of annoyance, and a quick,decisive crunch. )

 _Now to access the domestic warp. Huh? This site may have been compromised._

…

 _Log Date, 3 1 3. This is Peridot, reporting from Complex Delta. Despite the previously successfully accomplished warp repair and having personally ascertained the viability of the transit, the earth warp is unresponsive once again. Accounting for the signs of interference at the site itself, sabotage or interference by local lifeforms is a real possibility._

 _Physical access to the site might be necessary after all. Requesting use of Plug Robonoids._

…

(Her once businesslike, detached voice showed sprinklings of pride and relief now. )

 _Log Date 3 4 11, Facet Zero, the Capital. This is Peridot, now reassigned to robotics facility 407-A. In order to avoid any further equipment failures, I have been continuously monitoring the telemetry from Plug Robonoid, and spared no opportunity to do full perimeter sensor scans. So far, no system failures or environmental interferences impacting either the signal or the Robonoid itself have been detected in any shape or form. Course exactly as projected, deviations in speed and momentum far below the thresholds for negligible levels._

 _Transit is progressing smoothly._

 _Projecting from current status, Plug Robonoid is expected to arrive successfully at T plus 500 and allow for remote uplink to kindergarten facilities with no further complications._

… _._

 _Log Date 3 4 13. Facet Zero, the Capital, complex Delta. Peridot reporting!_

(This time, the barely restrained annoyance in her voice was almost palpable.)

 _Though that the Plug Robonoid did, in fact, arrive and land intact, we now appear to have lost the signals. The records on Earth's native wildlife are sparse, but even what little was available seemed to make it abundantly clear that they are of no consequence, and that nothing on this planet should have been able to stand up to anything we sent down, except perhaps some of the archaic gem structures left from back when the planet was still intended for colonization, but there should be no one left to operate or maintain them._

 _Unsatisfying as it may sound, it appears that it must have been some kind of unlikely event like a meteor strike or a freak atmospheric condition._

… _._

 _Log Date 3 5 02, Addendum – I don't understand! I had confirmed arrival and planetfall for every single Robonoid in every single location. I carefully monitored course and descent of each probe and went out of the way to run all available diagnostics; I even considered software malfunctions! Technical malfunctions should be impossible, especially on this scale!_

Someone _keeps breaking my machines. That's the only logical conclusion._

 _..._

 _Log Date 3 15 2 , Facet Zero, complex Delta. Peridot here._

(She sounded rushed, like she'd suddenly been called here, but steadied her voice even as she was speaking; In the background, one could hear her fiddling with some heavy machinery gear, perhaps trying to get herself into the proper place for something; there was a dull clang of metal-on-metal as she positoned her mechanical leg parts.)

 _Preparing uplink interface. It seems that, against all odds, one of the Robonoids has made it to the prime Kindergarten._

 _...Linking... Loading... Processing..._

 _Established Gem Projection Link with control room. Plug Robonoid has successfully landed on Planet Earth and entered_ _Prime Kindergarten Control Room_ _in Facet Five. Will proceed to perform status check of Kindergarten._

 _Now accounting for all operational Injectors. Checking for aberrations in perimeter._

 _Ugh, this Gem Tech is simply archaic.._

(And then, they showed up, all four of them, their bold declarations filling the screen as the confrontation unfolded.)

"The Crystal Gems...!" Lapis couldn't help but exclaim, promptly cursing herself for having lost control of her tongue.

She couldn't hold back the words, not help the surge of feeling that coursed through her as she saw those who had imprisoned her or so long, and more than that, heard the voices whose rare presence had been her only company in her oblivion.

As such, she certainly held no lost love for them – most of them, anyways – and certainly no desire to protect them, but after all she'd experienced here, she couldn't stand the thought of doing what pleased the representatives of homeworld, either, even if she understood that it was this what she needed to do if she was to survive.

Compared to the coldness she'd experienced here, the rebels seemed not necessarily _better_ , per se, but not inherently any worse than anything else in this cruel universe;

They might not care about other gems, but neither did homeworld, not really, and at least they'd let her go, at least one of them helped her;

Making their brave, yet foolish stand even as they knew that was only the beginning of what homeworld could possibly bring down upon them, they were effectively the underdogs in this, no matter what they – or rather, their older members, or the persons they had been millenia ago – had once done.

They didn't stand a chance, just like Lapis had not stood one, either.

Another thing that these records made clear was, that homeworld had been very certain that they'd left no survivors; Gems were supposed to be 'wiped out' on Earth, though even her interrogator didn't seem to know much more; perhaps it was a result of whatever had necessitated the wide-scale evacuation she'd been lost and abandoned in: That's why no one had come for her! She was far from allowing any of her hard feelings to soften, but for the first time, it began to dawn on Lapis Lazuli that she may not have known the full story, about the rebellion, the war, or the true reasons for everything else that had happened to her.

For once, it explained why the Crystal Gems had been so desperate to come after her and keep her from escaping, why they'd acted so strictly toward their strange younger member; Reduced to just a handful of survivors, stragglers, really, their continued existence had depended on homeworld thinking that they were dead, that there was nothing left to burn out from the scorched example they'd made of the Earth.

In all this time that Lapis had spent with them, well-aware that they were there, usually just outside the reach of her sight, it never occurred to her that something as apparent as their being there could be an unknown to homeworld, but in the end it was very obvious that they genuinely hadn't known:

Why else would someone like Peridot be sent, and, if her records were to be trusted, even entrusted to personally warp to the planet's surface?

It was apparent at this point that no matter how she acted, this gem wasn't a fighter or leader or administrator, nor even a scout; She was a simple, common, low-ranking worker drone, a literal _maintenance techie_ who

If Lapis had any sympathy left after the younger gem had dragged here, she'd almost have felt sorry, both at the pretty beleaguered impression that she made, frustrated at the universal bane that was nonfunctional technology and apparently appealing to her superiors to take the evident problem she was encountering seriously instead of attributing it to her lack of competence, or the fact that she was completely and fully out of her depth:

The tiny thing was evidently meant to be tucked away behind hull panels and maintenance shafts, not going to a planet full of bloodthirsty rebels all by herself without any backup, and, by the looks of it, set to go back there eventually?

What match could she be for a seasoned fighter with plenty of combat experience yet nothing let to lose?

The ignorant, pitiful thing. She'd be slaughtered.

But how bloodthirsty were they, really, though, if they hadn't shattered her the moment she'd warped onto their planet?

Lapis had not given them the chance to try that during her own escape, but the gem before her must have been defenseless;

Had they simply not noticed, or hoped that she would leave an never come back?

Remaining undiscovered seems to have been their greatest priority... or it was, until now.

Much like her, they'd been though dead for so long that their destruction would have become a basic fact of the world to homeworld, an established conclusion that, even with salient evidence such as this, was not easily questioned.

The final confirmation had come from Lapis' own mouth, or at least, what confirmation it had taken to solidity her captor's opinion on the matter.:

"So it IS the rebels...That's what they call themselves, right?" She momentarily swiped the widow that was displaying the recordings aside for a minute to check on some other records and confirm her statement. "They named themselves after the designation for the entire system, the Crystal Systems."

It appeared that homeworld's modern day society had become so stratified that even though this particular citizen seemed intimately familiar with the type of outdated machinery she'd tried to access, she had only been told the barest basics of one of the greatest and most devastating wars in its history, simply because it hadn't seemed relevant to what she needed to know to perform her duties.

Or maybe the Diamonds had swept some of their darkest deeds under the rug, not wanting to tell all too many of their underlings too many Details about the fact that the rebellion had been there, that it _was_ possible to defy the order; Earth had become the site of the greatest possible sacrilege – A Diamond destroyed by her own underlings, gems discarding their roles and fusing as they pleased; Even if the resistance had been crushed it was one of the darkest stains on the empire's history just by means of existing and continuing to stand for what it represented;

Better to leave the rebels as a dark, incomprehensible enemy, than to spread all too much of their symbols and ideals and terminology.

Better to leave Earth barren and destroyed like a devastated Sodom and Gomorrah, better to quietly bury the legacy of the fallen Diamond –

Because if one gem could defy her master so completely, so could all of them;

Because if one could fall, so could the others...

But probably not as long as obedient little drones like this Peridot meekly and ignorantly did her duty, or, as Lapis darkly surmised, as long as spineless cowards like herself came crawling back to them in the same ignorance; But what could she do?

Homeworld was awful, Earth was awful, the void was awful; There might not be a single place left in this universe, not a single thing left to do that wasn't tainted by some sort of dark memory, anyplace that was still and at peace...

This place certainly wasn't, not as the technician's voice blared anew and demanded for her to react, refusing to do what she wanted the entire universe to do these days, and Just. Leave. Her. Alone.

No matter how important she might act, she was a little, hapless nothing, and it was an unbearable imposition that she simply didn't seem to know.

Her tone was businesslike, even chipper, like she didn't care, or even _see_ the shames she'd forced Lapis to endure... no, she thought they might perhaps reach an 'understanding' that there would be 'cooperation'...

She should've known that from the very moment she'd adressed Lapis with this condecending, half-threat about how this didn't 'have' to be an interrogation, there was really nothing else that this exchange could have possibly become.

But good luck getting it through who was all up in her big, green head, all caught up in her mission and whatever delusions of grandeur she expected its completion to bring closer to truth

"So, you see that the information you have is very precious to us indeed.

As you saw on the recordings, I personally got visual identification on five individuals, two of which appear to be fused for no discernible reason; Unnerving as it is, that's consistent with what is known of the rebels' practices."

The green gem almost seemed to make a point out of cringing, scrunching up the skin around her small nose and severe brows.

Lapis, for her part, had barely noticed that one of her pursuers had been a fusion;

She was, of course, familiar with the taboos against cross-type fusion and had, as far as she recalled, reacted with the socially appropriate level of repulsion on the one occasion that she'd witnessed one taking place during a rebel attack, but that was just one of the many, many things that had come to feel distant and far away after her captivity; To begin with, fusion hadn't much concerned her day-to-day life as it was the domain of low-ranking fighters such as rubies, and the blue gem had been neither low-ranking nor a fighter and thus never experienced fusion herself in the brief, faraway timespan that her previous life appeared to be in the face of her long captivity;

And given how she didn't see herself being anything other than a prisoner in any remotely plausible path her future could take, she didn't think that she had any hope of ever experiencing fusion at all;

She wasn't meant for it any more, than, say, some high-raking Quartz who could already butcher dozens on their own.

In any case, she lacked the will or energy to feel like two gems of different types fusing worth making a fuss about; It seemed frivolous to even try and bring herself to care, but, of course, the little green gremlin took the rules very seriously and wanted to make sure that everybody knew that, though she was not so that paying eager lip-service to the authority would have distracted her from her actual objective for too long; She intended to make good use'of her 'informant' after all:

"Do you have any idea how many more of them there are?"

"I'm... not really sure... " Lapis half-mumbled noncommittally.

"You spent over 5000 years on that planet, and you want to tell me that you don't even know their numbers?"

The demanding edge in her voice alone was enough to leave the tired blue gem scrambling to somehow defend herself, not that the technician herself would have been all that frightening, but instead of her, it was what she or her higher ups might do if they came to somehow suspect her, like they their predecessors many millenia ago.

"I really don't know, I was _trapped!_ " she insisted, defensively, her distress apparent in her voice. "I couldn't exactly walk around and have a good look!"

"Did they not keep you at their base?"

"Yes they did, but, they had me trapped in a gem-powered object, I couldn't even take form!" Lapis explained, careful not to mention how she'd gotten into the mirror in the first place and that homeworld interrogators had been involved, lest her new tormentor think there may have been a good reason.

"So you were held captive? You're claiming that you're basically a victim in this?"

Her captor raised one eyebrow in skepticism, the distrust itself an implicit threat.

Lapis didn't think like she'd ever be anything else than a 'victim' in her life again.

Most likely, the younger gem had not even thought anything of her callous choice of words; her feelings were simply too inconsequential, too peripheral for her to consider in one way or another.

Despite her best efforts to keep herself together, a frantic quality was beginning to enter Lapis Lazuli's voice. "I- I sometimes heard them speaking from within the object, though, and I don't think there were ever more than three or four different voices... They're really just a small remnant force, I don't think there are any more left... The ones on the recording you showed me are the only ones that came after me when I escaped..."

"Aha." the small technician, her analytical gaze and vague expression doing little to deny or confirm Lapis' fears. "And what of their base, what can you tell us about its location?"

That was finally the last straw that broke the dam to the memories she'd been struggling not to replay since the very moment she first arrived in this cell.

 _Show us your base! Where is your leader?_

In her long captivity within the mirror, she'd been interrogated by warriors, organizers and aristocrats, and seen all of the ways that they tended to ask, repeating themselves over and over again, the soldiers with their gratuitously brutal intimidation, the leaders' proud speeches, insistence and strategical questions, the politician's perfidious ways to get her to show them exactly what they wanted –

But none of them had been anything like this little Peridot with her endless, storm of increasingly precise questions, her pressing for details, the speculations she wanted confirmed or denied and the "Why?"s she tacked onto her every response;

Her cross-examination was brief compared to the long-long time she'd spent being questioned before, but brought its impact back with full force just through being its continuation;

Even with a voice, she was overwhelmed and speechless;  
She thought of all the times the questions had rained down upon her and how she couldn't say anything significant, how she didn't _have_ any of the information they were asking for and at times wished bitterly that she _had_ something to give them, _any_ o the actual knowledge they could possibly want...

And today, she did; She'd _seen_ the rebels, after having been their prisoner.

The words with the power to placate them sat hot in her mind.

So, she spilled. She talked. She _sang_ , like a caged bird, kept for its beauty, value and rarity; The words flowed from her like water out of a broken vessels, the "Yes", the "No"s, the nods and headshakes, the panicked assurances and the brief, robotic answers, she just kept the replies coming as long as the Peridot would have them, and she took ample advantage of that: "Who's in charge?", "What type of facilities are still active?", "Have you encountered any sort of creature known as a 'Steven'?"

That last one, finally, gave her pause.

She'd seen a still image of him at the end of that one log snippet, together with the others

The technician had even known his name! How could she possibly know his name? It wasn't like with gems where you could tell just by looking a them... Rationally, one could have deducted that she could have learned it during either of her brief contacts with the planet that she had described and underlined through her records, but one an emotional level it because of the knowledge it brought back to the forefront of her mind, reminding her of the one person in a long, long time to talk to her like a sentient, conscious being and show her any kind of concern or friendliness, the only one to actually bother to _ask_ what her reasons and intentions had been instead of making their own assumptions and striking with ruthless force;

And as it t turns out, she _did_ have something like a spine after all, at least in the figurative sense, some last strand of integrity that had not yet snapped, but to find out like this, in this sort of a moment, when she had already loudly gasped at the mention of the name, her eyes going wide and evaporating all deniability she might have had;

But even in that moment, she knew that she couldn't sell him out;

The other three, she had no reason to care about, but the child had nothing to do with anything; He didn't

"No, nothing! I've not heard of anything like that!"

"You don't honestly expect me to believe this, do you?" the technician responded, visibly irritated. "What sort of cloddy dum-dum do you think I am?After your reaction just now? There must be a reason."

"It's just that..." Lapis felt her thoughts racing, the ones she'd tried to hard to muffle and silence for most of this interrogation – How could she give the green gem an answer that would mostly satisfy her, while incriminating the boy as little as she could? She couldn't mention his gem, that would just raise more questions, and, aside from it, he looked fairly human, so there was a chance that even if a homeworld search party made it to Earth, he might be able to hide and be left alone; She'd just have to try to keep her statements as general as possible and trust that the technician wouldn't prod further.

"It's just that he helped me, when I escaped. He set me free against the other's wishes, and treated my injuries with his abilities – "

"Injuries? But weren't you trapped in an object? Wouldn't you just have manifested your physical form? How'd you get injured, and why didn't you leave Earth right away?"

"Because I couldn't! I... I had a crack, which happened _while_ I was trapped, and it was bad enough that I couldn't summon my wings. That's what he healed...with his ...native abilities..." Lapis spoke increasingly reluctant, averting her eyes in shame felt toward someone who wasn't even in this Galaxy.

That might have been the significant tidbit that might have been enough to doom him.

"Please don't do anything to him!" the blue gem pleaded. "He is _not_ a threat, he's got nothing to do with anything! He didn't even know anything about the war or even the rebellion, he's not involved- he's a _civilian,_ Peridot." she spoke with deliberation, when she finally managed to come up with a term that would be technical enough term to convey the matter to someone who spoke nothing but homeworld's militaristic mechanical language. A term for what he was, for what _she_ should have been treated as back when all hell had broken loose.

"So that 'Steven' creature has healing powers, you say?And they even work on non-organic beings? Fascinating." the technician surmised, eyes narrowed in thought, though mercifully, not disbelief, more like she was processing the information rather than dissecting it. "Alright, thank you. I'll be sure to keep that information in mind."

Propping herself up with her heavy mechanical arms, the small green gem pulled herself off her half of the desk. "That will be enough for now. Lazuli, you're dismissed for now. You will be informed when we have need of you again. Computer, end recording. Peridot out."


	6. VI (The Mission)

VI.

'Dismissed' turned out to be a very much relative term here.

The small technician was certainly done pestering her with her questions, but made no move to suggest that she planned on releasing Lapis from her holding cell, or otherwise intended to grant her any sort of unsupervised leisure time;

Apparently, she was expected to stay put until they decided that they had need of her again, until they decided what to do to her, what new use to put her to.

Presumably, she would now have had the 'freedom' to stand up from the chair and sit or lay on the artless pedestal behind her, but playing along with this face in such a manner would only have validated it,

so she chose to stay where she was, apparently doomed to be treated to yet another dosage of watching the technician work, as she was the only thing that moved or lived anywhere in this room.

If only this room had something like a window; Lapis would have given anything for it; After all this time, she was finally back on homeworld, and all she could see of it were those nigh-featureless grey walls; But even if she were allowed to look outside this room, what were the chances that she'd actually recognize anything?

For one thing, she had lived in the spires and pleasure-gardens near the surface, or what could be regarded as such; Being the place where gemkind had first started out and spread out as their technology developed, this world had not been 'used up' as systematically, completely and planfully as the many colony planets that they had aquired precisely because homeworld alone was not infinite; but its citizens had been building up into its skies and burrowing into its depths for a long, long time, and most likely continued to do so after Lapis left, the original surface-line having been long-since covered in structures and riddled with holes;

The original atmosphere had evaporated away soon after they's begun to sap the molten core, a process that was still yielding abundant results in Lapis' day, but much of the bedrock and materials that once made up the planet had been molten into steel, quarried away for spires, or made into citizens, the later process being what 'left' the most 'intact' matter, simply because the crumbling, sucked-out ground left behind by repeated use for such purposes was no further good for any other use, and as such stuck around at the borders of other structures, often hanging half-floating in some precarious balance of gravity and riddled with the exit marks of long-shattered gems, as a unsightly, out-of-context proof of existence.

With some luck, even Lapis' own might still be out there somewhere.

Like an old town that had gradually grown naturally around central structure with buildings of different ages accumulating like sediments, the structures of the homeworld were a much denser criss-cross of steel and stone, half anchored together and half sticking into the void, rather unlike the 'cleaner' makeup of the colonies that were planned-out from the beginning, it much closer resembled a bustling hornet's nest or beehive, with holes so large as to allow the entry of spaceships and more, enormous conglomerations intended to house beings unworthy of basic craft, and means of even greater destruction, and it was said that somewhere in the dephts of the inner vacuoles, embeded nto the heart of the planet, one would find the motherships of the Diamonds;

But they were not places that the average worker was told much about, and spoken of with almost mythical reverences; and just as the border between the surface and the ground wasn't clear, there was no hard line between the ground and the sky; Increasing demand and material shipments from all over the empire fueled the towers' growth upward, layers upon layers covering each other with never, grander styles of architecture, reaching to where countless space elevators continued to reach upwards like the spines of a wheel, to a ring of shipyards and surveillance stations;

Or, at least, that's how it had been in Lapis' day; from orbit, with the view she'd had from the ship as it had docked onto one of the stations floating above, she had not been able to distinguish much about the individual towers, but even with the immeasurable fraction of this new, different homeworld she had seen, she doubted that this place was exactly... flourishing anymore, or that any place barren enough to produce a being like this technician would have its upmost, sharpest spines covered in anything as lavish or gaudy as the sights of her days, which, insofar as they still might have existed, had a good chance of being far, far away from Lapis' current location, miles deeper in the mantle or just as high above her, which seemed more likely given that a facility like this would not be put where many could look upon it; Not to mention that she might be in the center of a big, metal complex the size of a mountain, just rooms and machinery stretching out in every directions, all filled with mousey miserable beings like this green gem, ceaselessly performing their menial duties far away from all light and all air, where they wouldn't see a single thing that wasn't artificial for centuries on end, unless they had the... misfortune? Privilege? To be sent off-world now and then, like the specimen Lapis had just been confronted with.

Judging by how she'd described and documented one of her missions just now, there was a good chance that she'd seen more of other planets than of the surface of her own home, and even there, she would have worked mostly in rocky ravines, isolated caves or places already plastered with gem technology, or carry out the mission remotely through robots without ever leaving this complex -

And under any other circumstance, in any other state of mind, that might have led Lapis to feel sympathy toward her, but right now, it just added to her mental image of the eerie limited being she wanted to see her as, her-who-had-dragged-her-here, her-who-knew-nothing-of-what-she'd-seen; Newly-introduced to her in this fashion, she could only see it as something she was, not something that happened to her, a living prop in this grotesque tragedy, much like herself these days;

Surrounded from all sides by the the world she had sprung from, the very material that made up her being, she should have felt safe and at home, or, at least she somehow had that irrational expectation; In truth, she felt the dreadful certainty crawling on her back, the understanding that, even if she were to break out of this room, there were only walls and rooms to be found, no out-in-the-open for her to fly through and escape, notdown here, at least, and, the more she thought about it, the more it resulted in an oppressive, suffocating feeling weighing on her being – and if this were to be hell, the technician was the pitchfork-twirling devil sent to enhance the ambiance.

Lapis felt no kinship toward her as a being born from the same world, and not even becase of their different status or because homeworld was ultimately an origin shared by all of their kind; But simply because the world that had and endowed her with all her graces had been so very different place from the dried-up husk that coughed up this frail-looking little technician, that it might as well have been a wholly different planet, even if one had somehow become the other through the merciless passage of time, and that's what the scions of this new era had treated her as: As a remnant of a bygone age where strange and mythical things had roamed free, something that was not alltogether meant to be here anymore.

'Harsh realities', they'd all said, 'Lean times'; The empire's golden days were long since over, and beings like Lapis were perhaps deemed too frivolous to create anymore, and maybe the remaining ones used this as a justification to consolidate their influence through their rarity, but she hadn't been here for that, and might never truly now, as no one was telling her anything – Certainly not this technician, who knew this world, but not the old one, and thereby had nothing she could possibly have compared it to; She was blind and deaf to everything the authorities had no wanted her to know, or deemed as irrelevant to her allotted role; Everything that did not contribute to it as expendable and could be rationalized away without anyone's protest, least of all that of the technician herself. She just kept on eagerly doing her tasks, not knowing anything, and thus, having no chance of ever understanding anything.

She had, apparently, filed her report after a few closing statements, leaving a visual record of Lapis' desperation for all of posterity to gawk at, and then quietly resumed work on some other task, which involved her just standing there, reading through various document files, sometimes slowly & carefully, sometimes skimming to reach particular spots, and occasionally stopping to input something. During all of this, she never considered sitting down at the perfectly available larger desk just right of the room's center, though it was not hard to see why: It was only intended for gemssomewhat herself, the sort that would still have comfortably fit in this room, she could probably still have used it quite comfortably, were it not for its intended purpose of being used by someone of higher rank than her; On a busy day, this facility would probably contain one higher-ranking researcher gem and an entire team of Peridots smarming over the consoles, or perhaps overseeing various interrogations related to one particular case.

Lapis Lazuli's presence was, again, callously ignored, and upon realizing that, once again, nothing she did remotely mattered, she ended up pulling her knees upward, resting her legs against the edge of the tabletop so she could wrap her arms around them and perch her feet upon the edge of her little stool, resting her face on her knees to hide it from view;

She half intended to conceal tears, but they would not come, their source long since dried up.

Unable to bring herself to care for even her own despair anymore, all that was left for her to do was to chide herself for expecting that it could ever have been different, and to pretend that the rest of this whole planet she'd wanted so badly to get back to was not even there.

As expected, the technician didn't notice, too absorbed in whatever she was working on; So the sound that wound up uncomfortably reminding Lapis of her surrounding's reality had to come from a different source:

After some time – Lapis couldn't even say how much, with no means to tell the passage of time – a loud beeping was heard, the surface of some console glowed, and the technician – immediately dropping everything she had been doing and deactivating her personal screens – rushed over to the console in question, positioned herself in a straightened, presentable manner, and pressed a button;

Immediately, a large holographic projection filled the room, a floating, glimmering rectangle from the console itself almost all the way to the ceiling, not that it was a very high ceiling, indicative of the small, low-ranking gems these facilities were meant for; In a matter of split-second, the image cleared up, displaying a larger-than-life image of another gem, sitting in a large, multi-purpose, turnable seat with buttons and consoles embedded in the armrests and machinery, wires and crystalline tubes all around her.

The gem that appeared on the screen was, without doubt, a Peridot, a tailor-made technician with a slender, body meant for meticulous work on intricate machinery, much like the one Lapis had been dealing with so far, and yet, she was not like her:

Despite her overall still lowly position, she throned in her chair with an air of steely regality that immediately marked her as possessing some sort of authority, at the very least over her follows, her fingers – actual, hard-light fingers – were not inclined to stop their eager typing for the sake of this conversation, almost like it was something she did as unconsciously as thinking.

The lack of mechanical parts should perhaps have been the most immediately striking difference, but it really wasn't, not with how the prosthetic had been made to superficially mimic natural limbs like those possessed by this individual to produce a similar overall silhouette; Thereby this gem, whose image ostensibly displayed her as larger-than-life, was probably about as tall on her own as the other was with her devices, but the distribution of her mass was much more proportionate with her, her limbs and torso were of even thickness, still following that similar, slender basic shape, but overall thicker than their counterparts, and this was the most noticeable difference when one discounted her more serious demeanor.

As usual for gems of the same type, her hair had the same straight-but-voluminous, gravity-defying texture and had also been styled into a basic geometric shape, in her case an inverse triangle with the tips pointing upward and the individual strands styled so they would point away from her face;

The uniform she wore was identical to that of the younger technician complete with a similar visor which, however, did not cover as much of her forehead and was instead shaped like a rounded rectangle, crossing her face in two parallel lines.

Her gem, however, was embedded in the side of her head, like a sort of ostentatious hairclip, and she had a slightly duller, more olive-green shade of skin some of which she had 'decorated' with round pads attached to long, greenish-black wires, most notably at both sides of her neck, her shoulders, and her temples, the symmetrical arrangement of which one could assume to be part of her control room setup, intended to convey instructions to her machines with little more than a thought.

Quite possibly, she may have adapted her physical form to better interface with the contraptions that surrounded her and supplement the great mastery of them she already possessed.

Though intended for a completely different purpose and composed of a wholly different material, she seemed to be an existence more like Lapis herself, teeming with imperceptible power around the edges.

Sitting amid wires, blinking lights and holo-screens in a darkened room, a coolant tank faintly visible behind her, one got the impression that the senior technician was just as seamlessly unified with the machines she commanded as her underling, with the distinction that she could have ripped off the wires, stood up from her chair and waltzed around like any other gem:

Her machines needed her more than she needed them, which was not nearly as clear-cut when one considered the smaller, lime-green gem that was now saluting her with a light bow.

"Greetings, madam Supervisor! This is Peridot reporting in!" she spoke, her tone eager yet mousey.

"5XG." the elder Peridot acknowledged dourly, her use of the cut number instead of her full identification code suggesting a certain familiarity, yet a level of distance and authority at which more distinctive identification was still required. She probably commanded a lot of her fellow Peridots to an extent where she couldn't tell them apart just by appearance, which under many other circumstances would not matter, as gems of the same type were made to be interchangeable, so that just one look at their shape and gemstone would tell you everything you needed to know in order to work with them; The idea of sitting down to 'get to know' a specific individual and their particular history the way it was done on Earth would have been as utterly foreign to homeworld as an Earth citizen might have perceived the sight of seeing a squad of Rubies refer to each other as simply 'Ruby' and likely not even knowing each other's specific serial numbers that were more intended for the interactions of subordinates with their superiors;

And even then, Peridots in particular were different from Rubies in that they weren't exactly deployed in teams or squadrons, being designed to spent most of their time with just themselves and their machines aside from receiving the occasional briefing, even though they might sometimes find themselves working on the same projects in the same facilities, interacting to discuss and coordinate what was still, in most cases, fairly solitary work.

But as it seemed, this one on the screen had worked her way up to receive a supervisor's duties, which included the need to coordinate the many different missions that her subordinates were being sent to, inducing the necessity to keep track of just which exact Peridot was working on which exact duty.

As technology was a field that always kept developing and continuously branched out, there could be no be-all end-all solution to it, which led to those being assigned to attend to it to be subject to a little more preliminary training and sub-specializations than most other gems, and therefore, the need for a certain adaptability: While a Pearl on homeworld and a Pearl in a far-out provincial sector had more or less the same duties to perform, a Peridot on a shipyard and a Peridot in a kindergarten would need fairly different skill-sets, though there was also a need for them to be as multi-purpose as possible so they could be reassigned according to the needs of the empire. Therefore it had been more expedient to just make the Peridots read a load of files concerning their new missions than to create distinct classes of gems to operate different kinds of machines, which were bound to eventually grow obsolete anyways.

Thus, simple made it to keep track of the specific assignments that each Peridot had under their belt, so that they could be most efficiently utilized.

But whatever archievements '5XG' may have under her belt to justify her working on what was evidently a priority mission despite its routine nature, her supervisor evidently did not seem to think that it was worth putting up with her. Sure, she spoke mostly in a steady, businesslike fashion, her voice subtly deeper and fuller than her underling's though sharing the same shrill, semi-artificial manner, but there was just enough of a lack of welcoming-ness to suggest an already somewhat lowered level of patience which completely seemed to fly over the younger one's head.

"I assume you have read my report, Ma'am?"

"Yes." her supervisor replied curtly. "In the light of the ongoing difficulties of uncertain cause, and the cluster's projected growth patterns, we have no choice but to act swiftly and directly. You will be assigned a ship, and depart to Earth to retrieve the necessary data in person as soon as all necessary logistics have been taken care of."

"I-In person, Ma'am?"

"Yes, Peridot."

"Ma'am... I do not presume to question your orders, but I feel obliged to inform you that this might take dozens of cycles, even if we don't run into further complications."

"What complications, Peridot? This is a simple maintenance mission you should by all means be equipped to handle."

"Yes of course, Ma'am! B-but the mission might not be our only concern... I have witness confirmation and visual ID on the saboteurs, Ma'am... which you already know from the report, but, they might just be a bunch of defective stragglers, but they've proven capable of causing significant damage..."

"...Peridot. I don't know what sort of rumors you heard, or what sort of creatures you and your informant encountered down there; There are a lot of things being whispered about that planet, but believe me, Earth has been silent and wiped clean of all Gem activity for longer than you have existed. And whoever they are, they ought to be of consequence once the cluster emerges in full. I trust that you understand that?"

"Of course, Ma'am..." the junior technician repeated.

"Very well, Peridot. Also... no word about any 'rebel stragglers' is to leave the interrogation facility."

"But -I can assure you that it wasn't a mistake! I've appended both the visual and the witness testimony to the to the reports! "

"That is of no consequence. Uranite herself has already conferred with our superiors, and they were adamant that we not add any more fuel to rumors of rebel survivors, especially not when any chance of them existing is about to be eradicated forever. Governing the populace is their domain, we are to maintain the machines... "

"I- You know I would never consider disobeying, Ma'am!" the younger gem assured empathically, apparently as much out of genuine disdain for the notion as necessity. "I just asked in case it was important, to better serve you. That's the only reason I've been making these clarifications, to better serve you, Uranite, and our Diamond, Ma'am." she spoke, with what could almost have been read an earnest, urgent sincerity that could have been disarming if she hadn't been speaking of the same slavish devotion to her overlords that was expected from every gem who valued their continued existence.

"I'm just – as the one who's actually been on-site, suggesting that we exercise caution, in accordance with my duty to inform you of any and all relevant developments, Ma'am. Besides, a long journey like that will likely prevent me from attending to my other duties and projects, including the one I presented to you at our last-"

The lime-green gem may have been oblivious, but not so foolish as to not immediately hold her tongue when she heard her superior signing pointedly, letting her annoyance slip past the subtextual. "Surely you understand that whatever drivel you concoct when you're on standby that mayor may not turn up anything of use cannot possibly take precedence over a level-three priority mission?"

"Yes Ma'am! You're right, Ma'am! I understand that, Ma'am! That's precisely why I would propose that-"

"Go to Earth, Peridot. It will be easy. Do. Your. Task. Settle this business once and for all, before you cost us any more time and equipment! You're behind schedule as it is."

That, finally, made her intentions sufficiently clear, and, visibly startled, the younger technician saluted again, bowing her head excessively, not even considering to talk back now.

"Understood. Your will be done, Ma'am."

"It better be." the supervisor warned, as her right hand finally ceased its permanent typing and stretched to a considerable length from its wrist onwards, likely to reach for something that was off-screen, possibly to set up another communication channel.

All in all, one could be left with the impression that the elder technician had not stoop up from that chair in a very, very long time.

"Peridot out."

"Peridot also out." the smaller gem said to the dissipating holoscreen.

Her eyes narrowed, and she typed a few things into the console before her, before reactivating it again;

No fancy picture this time, just the blinking light from earlier staying on permanently, a bit of static, and then a much simpler audio-only transmission channel on which yet another high, squeaky voice answered: "This is Complex Delta in Facet zero, the central unit."

"This is 5XG. Hold on, I'm sending you a document file. Forward this authorization request directly to Uranite, and tell anyone who asks any stupid questions that I've got a level-three from the matriarch herself. Oh, and tell the operations division that I'm requesting a state-of-the-art warship and a pair of Quartzes as soon as they can spare them. Peridot out."

Taking her mechanical fingers off the keys, the small technician let out a deep sigh.

Then, she did something very unexpected.

"Rrrghaaah!" she exclaimed, furiously gesturing around with her arms, each set of mechanical fingers spinning in rapid circles. "That Y73! What's her problem?" she fumed, now apparently beginning to pace around and talk to herself.

At the very least, Lapis did not get much of an impression that the words were particularly meant for her.

By the looks of it, she was going to be spending a good while venting.

"She doesn't outrank me by that much, you know? We're both the same, we're both Peridots. She just had more time to get promoted because she's been around for longer!

And I get that! She's my supervisor – and I respect that! By the Diamonds, I wish I could have been around for all the experiments she's conducted, all the colonies she's helped to populate and the services she'd rendered to the empire, I've seen her work myself and read about it many times... "

She threw her arms up in frustration. "I really don't mean to disrespect my own supervisor, in fact, I admire her work. The cluster – that's the very thing our mission is supposed to check up on - was one of her finest works, and probably what got our department back in the higher-ups good graces after the fiasco that was the beta site. I respect her, I really do.

But why. WHYYYYY~~"

In her exasperation, the technician's high, shrill voice grew even higher and shriller.

Lapis wondered if she had any idea that her unfortunate prisoner had no idea what half the things she was saying were even referring to; She knew nothing of what they meant by 'clusters' or 'beta', and she couldn't care less, but as her prisoner, she was unfortunately condemned to endure the green gem's rants.

It was hard to feel any sympathy for her when one's own future was hanging in the balance – Lapis had heard enough to realize that she had a lot more to worry about that this little twerp had ever known; Having heard her superior, she knew better than to expect that they would simply release her anytime soon, lest she go out and spread those 'words about rebel stragglers' that weren't supposed to get out.

What was going to happen to her now?

The odds were looking dimmer by the minute.

Meanwhile, the exasperated technician was continuing her rant: "Why am I even being sent on missions like this? It was one thing when I was still new, but, a maintenance trip for geoweapon?! More often than not, those emerge perfectly fine anyways.

I'm a certified kindergartener, not a weapons engineer! - And I know that both technically fall into the same area, but – I signed up to this department to work in gem production, to give future generations the best possible conditions in these times of shortages...

I know that we need geoweapons and I'm glad to serve the Diamonds in any way I can, but think, Lazuli, why is it that we need those geoweapons in the first place?"

That she was using her name and pointing her arms her direction suggested that the technician was, in fact, talking to Lapis, though her lack of an answer did not keep her from continuing her inane ramblings that Lapis herself didn't even try to follow or understand;

This whole situation was already awful; Being subjected to the ravings of an angry maintenance technician with delusions of grandeur was just the cherry on top.

"We need them because we need to conquer more planets, to make more colonies, but the more colonies we claim, the more we have to use up to populate and maintain them, so we end up needing to conquer more planets to use more resources to built ships and incubate more troops.

We're going through planets so fast... what the empire truly needs is a way to get more use out of the fresh ones!

But because Y73 doesn't believe in my project, I'm stuck only being able to work on it when I'm on standby...

She won't even show my plans to Uranite! Sometimes I wonder if she even reads my progress reports. It's like she doesn't expect anything from me at all, just because she's been around since Era I, because she can shapeshift and summon a big wrench. What use does a Peridot even have for any of these things? We're not supposed to fight, or be large, or stretch out, we're meant to build and repair things! Those powers aren't even important for us, that's probably why the Diamonds decided that we didn't need them in the first place!

The very point of being a technician is to have technology do all those menial tasks for you!

Like this!"

For emphasis, she used her mechanical foot to kick a nearby console, though the resulting effect was not quite as superior as she's envisioned.

"All that matters for us is this, up here!" she had one of her mechanical hands form an arrow pointing to the temples on her big head. "And as far as that's considered, I'm above average. Certified! I have all the qualifications! So why am I stuck with maintenance missions? I want to be o f use to Yellow Diamond, I really do!

And I refuse to believe that this is the most efficient use for me!"

The histrionics continued. Her eyes, actually quite large when not narrowed in thought, were pretty much welling up with feeling at this point.

"But just wait and see, one day, I'll finally have my project completed, and then, they won't be able to ignore it! I'll present it directly to Uranite if I have to.

Oh, if only I could show my research to Yellow Diamond herself!

I bet she'd say, 'Oh, Peridot, you are such a genius, you have saved the gem empire! All the other Diamonds will be jealous of me for having such faithful, hard-working subordinates!' and then I'll say, 'Anything for you, my Diamond! I live only to serve you!' and then, while Y73 spends her days summoning wrenches and shapeshifting to reach high shelves, I'll get to work under our Diamond's foremost Uranite, and get put in charge of **my very own research division~** "

A manic gleam glittered in her eyes as she almost fell over laughing.

"Nyehehehehe! Hehehehe! Huehuehue~"

Eventually, though, her laughter ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, or at least, the rather tired little voice she used as she leant her back onto a strip of wall between two of her consoles:

"None of the clods down here appreciate any of my hard work..."

She let out a long, drawn-out sigh. "I really don't wanna go back to that cloddy planet..." she whined.

Go figure. No shit. And Lapis didn't want to be in this prison cell.

What would she give to have that little twerp's kind of problems...

By the looks of it, neither of them would be getting what she wanted.

Then, something beeped again. Lapis knew better than to expect that it would mean anything good for her;

Peridot, however, snapped out of her funk easily enough, nearly tripping over her own, metal feet to get to the communicator.

Always eager to serve, Lapis observed, disgustedly.

"T-This is Peridot!"

"Peridot in complex Delta? This Pyrite from the operations division. You're getting your warship. And your Quartz."

"Did I hear that correctly, Quartz, singular, just one?"

"Affirmative, only one. Must be one hell of a Quartz... As I understand it, she was hand-picked and assigned to the mission by Yellow Diamond herself."

"M-my Diamond did?"

"Her priority stamp was on your missive, wasn't it? Besides... you from the technical division might not understand that, but, it's not very surprising that she'd get personally involved, given the... history of that planet. Anyways, your assigned ship is currently docked at holding bay 4545-7C. You can warp up and perform an inspection immediately. You'll receive all further information once you arrive there. "

"What about the Quartz?"

"She's currently being briefed and will be sent to your location once you're done with the inspection."

"Location? Which one?"

"We'll contact you and confirm it when everything is ready."

"Understood. Peridot out!"

The mere involvement of her leader seemed enough to make her do a complete 180 on her attitude toward the mission, or, at least, give her a reason to pull herself together.

She'd acted self-importantly about it before, maybe she just needed all those complaints out of her system and her defenseless prisoner had been the perfect target...

Still, it was hard not to perceive the small technician as seriously weird, the earlier 'cold and unexpressive' impression of her had been quickly and thoroughly trashed, but Lapis didn't know what else to make of her, nor did she care, or need to in order to decide

The little green gem rubbed her 'fingers' together in excitement, barely containing her zeal. "A handpicked escort from Yellow Diamond herself! On my first own command, no less! Maybe she finally noticed my efforts... Or this mission is just that important! Either way, this could be my one chance to impress her! I'm so honored, I could just poof! And I get one of those huge brutes, too, there's just no way this could go wrong anymore~ "

She had already turned to rush out of the 'office' when she remembered, just barely, one more thing she was supposed to deal with, one very insignificant and forgettable thing, apparently.

The technician turned back again, in the direction of the holding cells. "Oh, and Lazuli? I'd suggest you use this time to rest up. You're free to contact anyone you wish, but, keep in mind that all channels are being monitored."

She didn't reply; Though for once, Peridot seemed to take note of that.

"Oh right." she spoke to herself, before gesturing toward the holding cell, apparently to remotely activate something;

And indeed: Roughly in the center of the right wall, what appeared to have been the same, seamless and featuress gray material as everything else lit up to form what appeared to be the outline of a yellow rectangle, with a horizontal line running across its middle but not all the way to the sides.

Regardless, the blue gem made no motion to rise from her place.

She just didn't care anymore; She just wanted that obnoxious little thing to stop talking.

"Come on, go ahead!"

The technician suggested, blithely gesturing toward the communication device with her arm, apparently oblivious to how unwelcome her comments were.

"Oh right. You wouldn't know how to use that, right?"

She stepped closer to the holding cell.

"Let me show you. It won't take long, those things are designed to be user-friendly."

Then, she deactivated the forcefield.

Now that got Lapis' attention.

As the yellowish barrier before her disintegrated with a clear, audible buzz, she immediately sat up, raising her head to look directly at the technician, who, upon noticing, reflexibly pointed her right arm in Lapis' direction, cautiously summoning a buzzing green ball of energy.

"I'm warning you, though, don't try anything – I might not be a soldier, but I never leave home without a blast-thingy."

Keeping the blaster pointed at a rather unimpressed Lapis, she nonetheless continued to the communicator panel, and, with a light touch of the central vertical line, summoned a trapezoid holographic screen, and delivered some instructions as to how to operate it.

"...basically, you just have to select the destination and the channel, and that's it. It's really very easy. You don't have to worry about accidentally pestering anyone important, either, all channels above your clearance are blocked automatically. Which should include pretty much all group and official channels at this moment, so don't even think of pulling anything, but, you can use personal ones.

Maybe there's someone who might want to know that you're still alive?

If you tell them anything you shouldn't, they'll be dragged into this if we don't cut the line first, so be prudent. "

She proceeded to step outside the forcefield's perimeter, putting down her blaster no sooner than she saw the forcefield activate.

Inwardly, Lapis wondered why she could speak so casually while pointing a charged weapon at her, unable to comprehend anything about her nonchalance.

"Anyways, I have a ship to inspect... No need to thank me, solving technological problems is what I do." she mumbled, and that was the last Lapis heard of her, not counting the swish of the automatic door closing behind her.

Lapis remained behind.

The lights went out.

Wether at least one gem was still in here or not seemed not to matter very much.

She was alone.

The glowing of the communication device taunted her in the dark, the holo-screen still activated, just as the technician had left it, daring her to use it as most of the greater thresholds to doing so had been worn away.

She could see herself getting up, walking up to the machine in a dawdling, uncertain stride, moving in silence for nothing to lose.

There were, in fact, a few 'addresses' she could think of calling, vague, blurry, half-retained memories as were the faces attached to them; She didn't know what she would even do or say if one of them actually replied to her, I they were even still alive, and, if so, till using that same contact data.

Stil, she attempted to type in a serial number, almost as if in a trance.

'Channel no longer in use.'

She tried another.

'Channel no longer in use.'.

And another.

'Channel no longer in use.'.

Now she knew it for sure, that nothing of the world she remembered had remained.

She wondered why she'd done this.

Had she not merely set herself up for yet another disappointment?

Even if she'd reached any of the gems in those distant memories, any time they'd spent together was so far away, so out of context – If they lived, which was doubtful given the war that had taken place, they were probably attending to their duties somehow, and unlikely to pause because of someone they'd briefly known thousands of years ago; The sands of time had simply buried all signs of her and all significance she'd once held, and how important could she have been in the first place, if no one ever came looking for her?

To begin with, most of these gems were probably best described as 'gems she had worked with at some point'.

Chances are, if she saw them now, she'd find them just as repulsive as the Peridot that had interrogated her earlier; She was different, too, her long captivity had changed her, warped her, twisted her into some strange and foreign being she no longer recognized.

From the beginning, it was never possible for the person she'd once been to ever truly escape, because there was not much left of her anymore, and there was not much she knew about her.

She was Lapis Lazuli, but who knew who that was anyway, anymore?

She'd snuck out from the spire she'd lived in to take one good look at the Earth's sparkling wilderness, out of a playful, innocent desire to at least see something of this planet on her brief visit, and that's when the fighting broke out, when she was lost and never found again because she had stayed from where she was supposed to be, and gone somewhere she was not supposed to go, just once, just out of the simplest of whim;

And now all she was was this wan, wrung-out shell marred by captivity, voicelessness and subjugation, her feelings comprised of nothing other than loneliness, pain, resignation and a spreading, toxic bitterness.

Try as she might, she could not find a single good memory within herself that hadn't since been marred, tainted or poisoned with doubt...

Except, wasn't there one time, even in fairly recent memory, where she'd been shown a sliver of genuine kindness?

Nothing grandiose or spectacular, just the simplest, most innocent of comforts, help in desperation, healing where one could have destroyed, a gentle voice that spoke to her with interest and curiosity instead of treating her like she was a thing, and it had been nice, it had been, alleviating, a small, tiny moment of respite inside the torrential, dilluvian calvacade of suffering that had been her existence so far.

Though the time span was probably puny compared to anything before her time in the mirror, it already felt like so long ago... what might have become of that gentle voice?

Was he still there, on Earth, now, bringing his simple, honest kindness into the lives of some other people?

If Peridot got there, what would she do to him? She claimed she was bringing a warship, a modern warship, and if it was as different from the ones of her days as everything else she had seen so far, then it was unlikely that he would be doing so for much longer...

Then, suddenly, a thought sprung up in her mind.

Would they fail to monitor a channel that was no longer in use?

Lapis didn't know, but even if they didn't, it wasn't like being discovered would change too much about her situation.

So what if they grabbed and restrained her again, what if they broke her form, or worse?

They could do nothing that hadn't been done to her before, and even if they could –

In her heart of hearts, she knew that she had already given up on herself.

So she did it.

She dialed every single private Earth channel she could remember, all of which turned up to be 'no longer in use', their owners no longer here, there or anywhere –

but perhaps, a the other end of their busted communication devices, there would be someone listening.

Despite the system's warning that no acknowledgment signal had arrived, and that the channels were all out of use, she pressed a button for a message to be recorded.

No turning back now.

She had already decided that one way or another, this would be her one last disobedience, her final act of will, no longer even a defiance insomuch as a simple proof of her existence, a message floating through the ether than no one may even pick up, but it would be there, a wave spreading outwards, for billions and billions of years.

If her life, in which she'd done nothing but suffer and lash out towards others could be used to do one last beautiful thing, to repay just one person who hadn't treated her with callousness, then so be it; It's not like she had anything else to do with it.

So, she gathered what little drops of life and color and feeling had yet to be squashed out of her, and spoke into the holoscreen:

"I hope you're able to hear this. There's a Gem looking for you, she even knew your name. I don't know how! I didn't tell her, I swear! She's on her way to Earth, and she's not alone. Steven, Homeworld is not the way it used to be. Everything here is so advanced! I can't even understand it. There's no way anything on Earth can stand up to it. Please, don't put up a fight, It'll only lead to devastation..."

She had no idea whether Steven would ever hear it, or what difference it would actually make, but there it was; Maybe those rebels would have the sense to surrender, or at least get Steven away from their base so he wouldn't share their fate.

After the transmission had ended, Lapis deactivated the holoscreen, moved over to the rectangular pedestal at the back of her cell and lay down on it, resting her head on her arms.

In the darkness, she couldn't see anything but a few glowing mechanical lights, not feel anything but her own form and the hard surface on which she lay, and not hear anything but the distant hum of machinery.

There was nothing let for her to do, so she waited.

She didn't notice that she had drifted out of consciousness until she was brusquely yanked back into awareness by a sudden resurgence of bright lights, loud noises, clanking, metallic steps and shrill voices, and as surrendered as she had believed herself to be, she did not appreciate being pulled from the all-consuming, comforting black void.

Everything happened so fast, just one thing after the other with no room for respite.

"Hey Lazuli! Hey Lazuli, get up!"

She did, raising her face from her elbows and propping herself up with her arms. "What are you doing here?!" she demanded to know, more trenchantly than she'd believe herself capable of -

Lapis did not expect to ever see the small, green gem again – Shouldn't she be en route to Earth, with her quartz and her warship?

"Uh, I'm here for you, of course." the younger gem clarified. "Isn't that obvious? You're still assigned to my mission as an informant, and we're not setting foot on that gem-forsaken planet like that without all the useful information in your head!" Against all mercy, she pointed her artificial fingers straight at Lapis. " You're coming with us!".

No. No. Just no.

This couldn't be happening.

They could not possibly be serious about it.

"Didn't you know? Well, you do now, so get ready. Our escort should be arriving any moment now."

Lapis might as well have been paralyzed;

The more the realization of what they were asking of her, the more the room seemed to spin all around her.

All she could think or feel or register was no.

No, no, anything but this...

They couldn't actually...

….they couldn't possibly mean to drag her all the way back to that accursed planet.

Finally, Peridot seemed to take note of the very obvious dread gripping her 'informant's' being.

"You coming? Don't make me activate my blaster again..."

As if that was what's worth fearing.

No. No nono!

"Are you... actually scared of the rebels? Don't be. We'll be showing up in a big warship; Whatever half-busted archaic museum pieces those clods have lying around on that planet, they're the least of our worries."

No. That was not it. She didn't comprehend.

"Besides, we're gonna have an escort! One of those huge Quartzes!" She spread her arms wide apart to illustrate her point. "With her coming along, there should be nothing for you to worry about!"

No, no, nononono...

"I merely requested a bodyguard, but my Diamond, in her boundless wisdom, assigned us a distinguished, decorated veteran from the Earth war, with experience in dealing with both the terrain and the enemy. I'm told she's a veritable one-gem-army!"

"See?" she activated her fingerscreens, and pointed them in Lapis' direction, using the other hand to point at the text it was displaying. "It says so right here in this missive!"

Then, the small gem suddenly stopped in her tracks. Something in that file was not to her liking.

"Wait, this can't be right... This must be a mixup, there's no way on homeworld that Yellow Diamond herself could commit such a gross oversight, this has got to be some error in the file... that Pyrite never said anything about a Jasper..."

The technician looked at Lapis, as if she were somehow responsible for this or had any power to change this. "What are we supposed to do with aJasper, of all things?"

She was back in full tantrum rant mode, forgetting any intention she may have had to convince her prisoner.

"I get that we're at war, I understand that they couldn't spare any Amethysts on such short notice, but, can't they at least send us an Aventurine or something?" The technician grumbled demonstratively. "Why does it have to be a Jasper! Those are from the Beta site, can you believe it? Beta!"

She exasperately shook her arms at Lapis as if she was somehow supposed to understand what any of these terms meant. "This file can't be correct. I asked for an escort, not some super dense half-defective clod for me to babysit!

Sure, now and then some military clod I'm assigned to is gonna tell me that at least some of them were of use and somehow got infamous, because, they would, but I've dealt with Jaspers before, and, well... any of the few that survived to this day tend to pack a sufficient punch, but there's usually not much going on upstairs. That's more a liability than a help!

This simply cannot be!

We're dealing with very sensitive equipment here, the last thing I need is some shoddy, cloddy hackjob **Beta** product that would never have been allowed to live if it wasn't for the war-"

It was then, that one of the doors to the 'office' suddenly swished open, cutting the technician's rant in two and knocking the breath out of her without the simplest touch.

Whatever Peridot had expected to come through that door, it most certainly wasn't **this**.

(People talk of premonition like it's something strange and rare, but it's not; It's just remembering in the wrong direction, it's just a natural consequence and sign that the seeds of what has now become the present must have sprung up somewhere in the past, like immediate sparks that are not love but become love, qualities that factor in the outcome of later decisions, or vague bad feelings that turn out to have been well-founded;

Lapis Lazuli did not know what the future would hold;

All she knew was, that the moment she laid eyes on what came through that door, she felt something inside of her grow cold.)

* * *

~Tonight I feel like neon gold/I take one look at you and I grow cold~


	7. VII (The Brute)

~ It's a bloody war/ of **attrition**

I wonder which one of us/ is gonna last the night?

'Cause I have all of my wits around me

And I'll be **damned** / if I'm done~

VII.

Whatever Peridot had expected to come through that door, it most certainly wasn't **this:**

The gem in the doorway was everything a Quartz soldier was supposed to be, and then some.

Lapis was familiar with Quartzes, of course, they had still been a relative novelty in her days, a caste of large, hulking warriors meant to serve as the empire's elite shock troops, and as such significantly higher-ranking than your simple ruby foot soldiers; They were still below the aristocrats, but otherwise, the hierarchy of homeworld's conquest-loving society situated them significantly above most simple worker gems and even relatively specified single-purpose ones such as Peridot technicians.

But even knowing all this, even having witnessed many of their kind in her brief stint in the war, Lapis had never seen one so terrifying.

If your average Quartz was to be thought of as something like a living tank, this one was the equivalent of a gigantic a siege engine.

Ironically, the gemstone itself was a tiny, unspectacular thing with uneven coloration and a simple, sharp-edged pyramidal cut, a disproportionately small thing sitting plain in the center of her face, where her sense sponge would otherwise have been;

But the form she projected around her was a frightening thing to behold, looming, massive and so, so terrible;

She was so tall that she needed to bend down briefly get past the doorframe, towering over Lapis by a good third of her height, and exceeding at least six times her width;

But her size was only the beginning: There was nothing about her body that wasn't firm and taut, not a single thing about her that didn't seem hard, coarse and vulgar, and yet, by homeworld's standards, she would likely have been considered as alluring as she was menacing –

Perception of beauty in gems was not quite like its counterpart in humans, as it had arisen under very different circumstances as a byproduct of a very different biology and life cycle, but one commonality was that there were both subjective perceptions, a kind of 'personal taste', yet also societal ideals that existed in parallel to those and didn't quite encompass the full spectrum of individuals, being influenced as much by universal instinctive preferences as well as the highly artificial social conventions and constructs that had sprung up around them;

For example, an onlooker's vision-spheres may have been drawn to her enormous size and the firmness and definition of her form, in the same way that the human eye might be drawn to imperceptibly subtle symmetry in a face, but in a social context, she would have been praised not so much for any particular praised features or traits, but her overall shape, and how it just seemed to coincide with the platonic ideal of how a Quartz soldier was expected to be shaped, and how finely suited she seemed to fulfill the purpose ordained to her by the order of the diamonds.

Obviously, there was a hypocritical catch in this concept of praiseworthiness, as was only so much attention one could attain for being, say, an ideal Pearl or an ideal Ruby, as those classes of gems were, by their very definition, not intended to outshine;

These great warriors, however, were very much intended to be the pride of the empire, to the extent that the elite would watch their displays in large arenas when there was no warfare for them to do, or when they were between assignments, and this colossal specimen must have gotten much admiration indeed:

The warrior's body was the peak of maturity, her limbs long, her hips wide, as were her shoulders;

The opulence of her full lips and ample chest coexisted with her thick, muscular neck and the strong, chiseled features of her long, rectangular face; Her pronounced, dark brows were complimented by the long lashes that framed her piercing yellow eyes, which reflected back the dim lights of the screens, not quite like they were glowing, but coming pretty close to it, and yet, they were only the cherry on top compared to the wild, voluminous silver hair that flowed down her back, almost all the way to her strong thighs, a display of might and grandeur supplemented by the high-colored dark cape strapped around her shoulders, held together by an amber brooch indicative of her exceptional status –

And like the standard-issue uniform bodysuit she was wearing below it, and the heavy red boots that reached up to just below her knees, it served to flaunt her immaculate body more than it significantly hid any of it, least of all her bulging, muscular limbs, all four of which told long tales of both abnormal levels of inborn prowess and rigid, strenuous discipline, each of them significantly thicker than Lapis' entire body.

The definition of her muscles was particularly apparent on her arms and shoulders, as those were not covered by her uniform, sculpted and athletic to a degree that should barely even be attainable, but in a natural, functional, actually useful way that involved some padding, exposing loads of sturdy, resplendent flesh in a dark tangerine color of rare, vibrant intensity.

The only thing remotely resembling a fault were some minor irregularities in her coloration: Here and there, her body sported a few camouflage-like bands of a rusty martian red, somewhat lighter than the dark mahagony-red on her boots and the top of her uniform, most visibly as a diagonal stripe on the upper portion of her face, around her eyes, a smaller one cutting into her right cheek, two intersecting bands just below her right shoulder, and the majority of her left forearm, which markedly the arm she had chosen to use to grip the doorframe as she'd bowed to fit underneath it, implying that she was, in fact, left-handed, a trait no less uncommon with gems as it was in humans, though at this point, it was more of a striking unusual trait than anything that would have been considered a serious abnormality.

Even her teeth were perfect, evenly spaced and blindingly white.

She was, in effect, a walking, talking billboard to the downtrodden, here to remind them that the world wasn't fair, that it's stars and suns smiled upon some of its denizens more than others, and everything she did oozed with the privilege of someone who had not been told 'no' very often in her long, long life and would not care for the word if she heard it.

She waltzed in like she owned the place, unfailingly confident despite what, to her, must have been unfamiliar, cramped surroundings... and why wouldn't she be, given that she likely outranked every single gem in this mountain-sized facility?

She filled the space wholly and unapologetically, taking up all that was available to her and not concerning herself with whoever else may need it, sauntering proudly at a pace of her own choosing, lest she be deprived of the relish she must have derived from the resounding booming of her steps and its echoing in the corridor behind her, or the subtle vibrations moving through the ground when she shifted her weight, making her existence felt;

As such, she had an incredible presence in the room, the sort that could make the air feel heavier and the temperature feel colder merely by her presence and the menace she exuded; There was no ignoring her.

She walked in with her head held up high and her eyes narrowed at those beneath her, her hand not merely forming fists, but holding a certain tension and alertness in the muscles of her arms, ready to grab, seize and tear at anything that came her way, or to strike at a moments notice, an implicit threat as much as the distinctly displeased expression upon her face;

All of this with the side effect that her elbows were already somewhat angled and ready to dig in, dispelling any illusions that one could expect any sort of assistance, trust or camaraderie from her: Here was a a solid believer in 'Every Gem for herself', and as such she stood, for herself, of herself, by herself, the most standalone of existences, with the fierce, cold eyes of a lone warrior.

All-Gifted as she was, no one would ever have compared her combination of allure and lethalityto that of a war-goddess; She was a harsh and artless thing unfit for such poetical descriptions; The closest in human terms might perhaps have been an athlete, in terms of the dedication, the hard, competitive zeal, but ultimately, she was something more processed than that, a thing, a war-machine, a destroyer in every part of her nature, with fists like flails and a head like a battering ram.

She did not wait to be invited into the room, she just waltzed in without a moment's hesitation; And neither did she stop at the heartland of anyone's personal space, fully expecting them to move out of her way or submit to her grip.

She paid no respect to nothing that she didn't chose to respect, or pass the test of her very own standards of what constituted someone deserving; And as of this moment, no such person resided in this room.

Even the ever impertinent technician flinched backward when the warrior walked in, perhaps out of some sort of natural respect for a being that could easily snap her in half, proving that she did have some natural instincts in her, though her wisdom was not enough to keep from immediately composing herself once she got out the warrior's radius, eyes briefly flitting around as if to anticipate where the warrior would move next, and, without paying the self-important little engineer a glance's worth of attention, she proceeded to prance right past her, and proceeded to take up residence on the larger desk that the green gem had not dared to touch, casually sprawling herself across the tabletop instead of bothering with the chair, using her right hand to prop herself up as she leant back, whereas her left rested on the corresponding knee, ready to take action at a moment's notice, and her long, silver locks spilled across the control panels along with the fabric of her cape, though their impressive length led some of them to hang off the table.

Her lax, irreverent position merely accentuated her sheer size, how disproportionate it was to a piece of furniture that, in comparison with Lapis herself or the technician, had once appeared large, before this tremendous mound of solid flesh had come to throne upon it.

Behold the Behemoth: A creature made to never know fear!

In her world, she had no equal, she was Queen over all who are proud.

Could anyone put her in binds? Could anyone strike fear in her, make her proud face contort in strained urgency? Could anything lay waste to the opulent splendor of her form?

Perhaps, most likely. In theory, everything ought to have its fault lines and breaking points, some more apparent than others; Apply enough pressure, and anything will collapse into a black hole.

But right now, from where Lapis was standing, it didn't feel that way.

All she could see was this beast of a gem who had been sent for the sole purpose of dragging her back to her personal hell, kicking and screaming if need be.

In time, the warrior would come to provide her a veritable deluge of thoroughly legitimate reasons to loathe and despise her like she'd never done before;

But even before any of that took place, Lapis had hated her, like love at first sight, except some kind of twisted, warped, utmost opposite counterpart of that.

She hated her because she was strong and bold and beautiful, because her steps thundered and made her existence known with a certainty that no one could dare to ignore, because she would never be small, voiceless and insignificant, because she was everything that Lapis was not... or so she thought, at the time.

It was the more merciful possibility, compared the one she would come to contemplate much, much later, that she had perhaps recognized a long-silenced part of herself, the ugliest one, the one she never wanted to look at, everything she never wanted to be, until its likeness was reflected back at her in the guise of this revolting brutal savage, the darkness within herself calling out to the black, black heart before her, begging for the oblivion she deserved.

But whatever your perspective, there could be little doubt that the warrior was a loathsome and terrifying being; Not with the way she outright flaunted it, seeming to chose every word and movement with a display of superiority and intimidation in mind;

The small green technician might have asked for an 'escort' to be 'assigned' to 'her mission', but it was obvious that she was rather alone in her opinion of just was supposed to be the leader of the operation; There was no need to know the intimate detail of homeworld's hierarchy or whatever undoubtedly impressive service record this ancient veteran had behind her: It was enough to have witnessed the way she'd marched right past the Peridot like she was nothing but a zero to her left.

It wasn't after a few hearty gulps that the younger gem even dared to address her, but before she could bring her throat to form words, the warrior spoke first.

Her voice was, as one might expect, somewhat deep, but more than anything rough, gruff and full in its coloration, displaying the same proud, dismissive coarseness inherent by the rest of her demeanor;

"Are you the one who requested an escort for a mission to Earth?"

'You', she'd said, just 'you', no names, no ranks no titles, though her tone suggested that she wouldn't object to adding an insult if motivated to the slightest extent.

Right away, it was apparent that she was no so much expecting instructions as impatiently demanding an explanation for why she had to put up with demands on her time;

Just by sheer comparison and the simple act of being here, the warrior revealed just how harmless and puny the technician really was, just a pitiful little gem tiredly doing her job, practically pedestrian when compared to the viciousness of a real, violent killer.

The little green gem, however, didn't quite seem to know what was good for her – She did have the minimum amount of sense necessary to know that she should avoid infuriating the large soldier, but lacked the prudence to completely give up on her personal agenda, at least insofar as that was in accordance with direct orders.

As one might deduce from her earlier interactions with her supervisor and her ravings about Yellow Diamond, the green gem wasn't very socially astute nor very good at keeping her opinions and judgments to herself, usually because she thought them to be correct, but her attention was nonetheless directed toward keeping track of social hierarchies, fulfilling her part in those and possibly rising, at least within the bounds of what was deemed proper for a low-ranking gem like herself; She was not without a certain mousey, obsequious tendency to curry favor with the one in charge and try to reach a good standing with them, in accordance with what her beliefs declared to be proper, unless her own wisecracking led her to foil this inadvertently...

But none of this approached seemed suitable to wearing fruit with the large warrior, who'd likely see any overly servile behavior as weakness to scoff at.

The technician might have been self-important and insensitive, but at the very least she could be counted on to act in accordance with reason and display a minimal level of civility and even sincere goodwill towards those on her side;

Good luck expecting any of these qualities from someone who wouldn't even use anyone's names until they'd proven that they could break her to pieces, otherwise piqued her interest, or just given her reason to try freaking them out with unwarranted familiarity;

By contrast, the technician, though irritable, irritating and likely not much of a cooperator herself, more intent on letting no doubt be cast on her technical and scientific capabilities, at least knew to discern when cooperation was the best option for pragmatism's sake, and when she should at least make a hamfisted, unsophisticated attempt to smooth things out and refuse to hear hints of hostility in the expectation that competence and good service could remedy it.

No low-ranking gem could hope to live long on homeworld if they didn't pick up ways to deal with moody superiors – In the case of this particular one, she seemed to try to dispel the awkwardness by switching into 'business mode' and sticking to the domain of what she knew.

"Yes, yes I am." she confirmed, answering the warrior's earlier question, somewhere between forced, blithe nonchalance and exaggerated professionalism. "It's fortunate that you could make it here in such a timely manner. I'm Peridot, and over there, that's Lapis Lazuli. You must be Jasper?"

The warrior's only reply was to narrow her eyes into a marked expression of annoyance.

"Alright, soldier! Our mission is to check the progress on the cluster, and to determine when it will be emerging. The cluster, as you may be aware, is a developing geoweapon embedded in the earth's mantle, which was inserted following the colony's abandonment, and as such, the result of a series of experiments on the subject of artificial fusion. To serve as raw material, the division leader at the time selected-"

"Spare me the pointless gibberish, little technician." the quartz interrupted, gesturing to her chest with her big, red fingers. "I am a warrior! Whatever tinkering and button-mashing you're up to is no concern of mine. How about you mind your machines, and let me attend to my duties?"

Everything about the veteran's body language and tone suggested that she viewed the younger gem's affairs as utterly beneath her.

Proudly flaunting her status as a warrior, she wanted to nothing to do with the scientific part of the mission, in keeping with how her subordinate only seemed to know the barest bits of the Earth war, yet another example of homeworld's heavily stratified society, in which every gem was given exactly the knowledge and abilities they needed to fulfill their roles, and nothing more. In theory, everything ought to be so coordinated that cooperation across fields would never be necessary.

Once, Lapis herself had also taken this for granted; Then she got caught in a crossfire that was not supposed to have been any concern of hers, either, and wished she'd been warned of such dangers; But no such worry could possibly have penetrated through the quartz soldier's hubris, for despite all, there was a marked difference between the two: The technician may have been a fatuitous little drone, but this warrior was one of homeworld's golden children; The entitlement practically oozed out of her ears, and as a quartz – and a high-ranking one by the sound of it – she had probably gotten away with it all of her life, and woe to anyone with the nerve to cross her...

Diplomacy and Teamwork were apparently not skills she had ever needed, nor had she ever cared to learn them; By all evidence, she was a vicious creature through and through, a ferocious thing who knew of nothing but bloodshed, refused to hear of anything else, and treated this as something to be proud of.

She had probably been treated with awe and respect just by virtue of existing as she did, and by the looks of it, she'd gone on to use that privilege to scoff at everyone beneath her, and trample them to her heart's content.

It was one thing for someone to be harsh or even cruel to their enemies, existences that were a threat or whose goals were simply not compatible with yours, but this striped gem was simply immensely unpleasant to be around, even for her supposed allies.

Thus rebuffed, the little green technician still didn't abandon her pride, or rather, chose not to hear the rebuke and went on like she'd heard what she wanted t: "So, they already told you everything in your briefing?"

"What they told me that this is a routine maintenance checkup. Shouldn't you be able to handle those by yourself? I was hoping that I'd get at least a few good fights at the Great Colosseum before my next deployment, now I'll have to delay my departure altogether because of a simple escort mission!"

She said the last two words with a particular disdain. "If you feel like explaining, can you explain to me again why anything about your mission requires the presence of a Quartz Soldier? Couldn't you just have taken a couple of Rubies if you're scared to clear away the organics?"

"I'm equipped to handle those." the younger gem stated, evidently feeling the need to assert that. "This is not about them, or the Earth, or anything else about the mission. I would have finished this long ago if it wasn't for the constant sabotage. There's Gems down there, and there shouldn't be. Possibly surviving rebels. They keep breaking my things!" she complained, beginning to sound imploringly petulant in the face of her newly-assigned superior's lack of concern.

At this point, something did pique the warrior's interest, however slightly; She sat up into a straighter position, crossing her now free arms in front of her chest, her demeanor just as harsh but mildly less blasé. "Surviving rebels, you say?"

"There's no way to be sure, at this point, but they claim to be Crystal Gems, and our witness has confirmed that. They seem to be just a small remnant force, but they're persistent. You'll be given the interrogations reports, if you haven't seen them already, and we're bringing her, so you can question her yourself at any time you please if you have any further questions..."

"I have a question for you right now: What exactly do you mean by 'small remnant force'? Do you have any sort of on intel on their leader?"

"Well, but they appear to be led by a relatively small two-gem fusion. For some reason, they haven't been seen apart yet."

"A Fusion?" The warrior scoffed at the notion, stifling some laughter. "Like what Rubies do?"

"Not exactly. It's seems to be a ...cross-type fusion." the smaller gem explained, not without her face contorting into a rather uncomfortable cringe. "I don't understand it either, but for whatever reason, the fusion seems to be charge."

"A Fusion? A leader? Impossible... what about Rose Quartz? Has there been any sighting of her?"

"Well, no, but we've only identified four confirmed individuals including the fused ones, and we have no way of knowing if those are all that there are. There don't seem to be much more, though."

"Four?" as if to make up for any semblance of serious interest she might have displayed earlier, the warrior's ridicule was all the greater now: "You can't be serious. You requested a fully armed warship and me over four gems? And you call that a 'remnant force'?"

The warrior sighed in exasperation.

"That planet is a ruin, and it has been one for a very long time now. What little structures were even completed should be crumbling to dust by now, but everything of consequence has been burnt to the ground to the ground in the war, and a bunch of lost stragglers aren't going to change that. There is nothing left. Certainly nothing that can stand up to a warship. You can pilot one of those, right? Isn't that what you're supposed to begood for, midget?"

The scrunching of the technician's ego was practically audible, and for an instant she could be glimpsed gritting her teeth, but to her credit, she did not let this provocation break past her professionalism; Perhaps she saw putting up with the likes of this warrior as yet another thing she didn't get enough appreciation for.

"Ships can break, or be sabotaged. Just like they sabotaged everything else I've sent down there. I don't expect an outsider like yourself to understand that, but, this is an important mission from my Diamond, and this rebel scum keeps interfering with my work! We can't afford any further delays...

Besides, if they're so harmless, then why did my Diamond approve the request?"

"That is because it is the Earth; You're too young to remember the black, black stain on the history of our empire that it embodies... There is not a single gem alive from back then who won't be relieved when that cesspit of transgression is blown out of the sky. Nothing good has ever come from that useless hunk of rock!"

(At that, the technician briefly narrowed her eyes in confusion, like she knew something, like something didn't quite add up. Still, even she knew better than to interrupt or provoke the warrior as she was speaking.)

"Speaking of which, aren't you going to destroy it, anyways? What's the point in landing?"

"Well, it will be destroyed eventually, but we don't know when. It might still be a very long time, even by the most optimistic estimates, it will be quite a while... That's precisely why I need unhindered access to the surface."

"So we won't be around to see it destroyed? What a shame!" the warrior exclaiming, briefly grinning with blood thirst.

"Seeing that burnt-out husk reduced to rubble would have been the one worthwhile thing about this entire fool's errand!"

Back in her cell, even Lapis couldn't help but flinch at at evident glee that this creature displayed toward the concept of an inhabited planet being destroyed, despite her apparent overall annoyed disposition. Even the technician, who evidently deemed it a reasonable sacrifice she was ready to carry out with nary a second thought or even a concept of why it should be anything worth regretting seemed a bit unnerved at the mighty veteran's sheer relish.

Not that she cared much. Sure, she had some affection toward Steven, but she also knew that humans were very short-lived creatures.

Whatever happened to the other Crystal Gems after he lived out his natural lifespan, or, for that matter, the rest of that planet, was no concern of hers; She could only see it as the prison-house that had held her, the prize for which those rebels had fought when they sparked her war that cast her life into the fire;

And now that she was almost certain that her cause was a lost one, she could not help but want her innocence back, she wanted her home, and resented the focal point of those desires that she knew could never be pacified.

She was not the sort to go out of her way for a vengeance on something that was already out of her site, for it would bring her nothing, given the choice, she'd certainly prefer to live in peace, somewhere out there in the world... but by now she knew that this wasn't ever going to happen.

She didn't exactly want to see that world burn, but she couldn't bring herself to muster much sorrow for it, either.

"I- In any case, we'll be the last ones to ever go there." the technician spoke, in what was presumably an attempt at striking a conciliatory note. " So this is your last chance if you want to take one last look at where you... fought."

She seemed unduly cautious for some unknown reason, but it swiftly became apparent that she had not been cautious enough, when the ancient warrior brought her left fist down on the table.

"Do not presume to speak to me of the war, midget!" she spat, in the process of rising from where she had been seated. "Do not presume speak to me of duty! You know nothing of the battlefield! You know nothing of the Earth! You know nothing of honor, or glory, or abnegation. You've spent your entire life safely tucked away behind your machines! You don't even know what you're talking about!"

There was no need for any explicit threats or further demonstrative acts; It was enough for the warrior to merely stand up to her full height, and take a few measured, unhurried strides in the younger gem's general direction. She stood so tall that the crown of her head was less than a foot away from the ceiling; They weren't particularly large steps for her her, but each of them served to propel her a considerable distance in relation to the room's proportions, in a swift, yet abrupt manner – She seemed satisfied when the technician flinched back instinctively and ceased, though she still kept her fists clenched and her posture somewhat forward, as if ready to step into motion at a moment's notice, which, at this point, was probably just a result of her default attitude more than a a specific act of aggression against anyone in particular, but the mark had been made;

It should have been made apparent to everyone in the room that she was exactly as ill-tempered as you'd expect of a ruffian savage, and that anyone unlucky enough to further provoke her ire would be doing so at their own risk.

But instead of sinking together in submission, the technician merely brought one of her mechanical hands to her temples, perhaps holding back a sigh.

"I'm not talking about war. I'm talking about my mission. And I know everything there is to know about that. That's literally what I'm for. You're for punching things. I requested you because I need things punched."

"So you say." The warrior's voice dripping with condescension, evidently calling the technician's judgment into doubt.

The sigh refused to stay in any longer.

As it would appear, neither of the two particularly liked to have their competence questioned.

"Listen, Jasper. All I need is physical access to the central control facilities at the prime kindergarten in facet five, and for you to keep the rebels off my back while I work there. Can you do that?"

Refusing to dignify this with an answer, the warrior contented herself with a frustrated exhale.

"Let's just get this over with. What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing, now that you're here. The ship's standing by in its orbital dock, it's all inspected and ready for departure. I've made sure of that. All that's left to do is to escort our informant on board."

"Her?"

"Exactly."

The warrior, who had just vaguely gestured in the general direction of the holding cell, now turned her full attention to Lapis, looking down her nose at at her as she scrutinized her with a scowl.

The blue gem had been sitting on the cell's pedestal in a curled-up position, legs drawn close to her body, arms crossed on top of them like a wall from behind which to observe her damnation unfold.

Despite this, she felt utterly exposed when she noticed the quartz' piercing yellow gaze closing in on her.

She knew what would come next, and she didn't want it.

What's more, she didn't want that terrible savage to come anywhere near her, and yet she kept closing in.

"Deactivate the forcefield.", she ordered, not even bothering to spare the technician a glance as she did so.

Within the instant, the green gem had complied, and the yellow barrier disintegrated.

Lapis immediately wanted it back.

Without its tint, this place and the unspeakable possibilities it held seemed that much more real, much like the certainty of what was about to happen.

She couldn't resist. She couldn't escape.

She remembered how things had gone when she'd been brought here.

She'd decided to surrender, that she wouldn't cause any more trouble, but...

Why did she have to walk out of here on her own two legs, knowing what it would lead to?

It was like being asked to ascend the scaffold, and do it gladly.

Every step she made made her complicit, made her have agreed, made her have brought it upon herself, made her no better than them, but she didn't want this she didn't want this she didn't want this...

"What's the holdup? Move it!" the warrior barked, mercilessly.

She was ever so loathsome, so loathsome it was an achievement; It was as if she were actually longing for the day when someone would snap under her provocation and break her insufferable face...

Swallowing, reeling, Lapis Lazuli forced herself to get up, watched herself put her feet down and stand on them, trying to convince herself that it wasn't happening.

Her captors were impatient, she couldn't afford to keep them waiting, couldn't afford to process or release her fear in any imaginable manner, even if she had to force herself to move forward, fight herself on every step of the way.

Her feelings were of no consequence, her existence was of no consequence;

And yet, she was stepping forward on her own feet, stepping forward to be dragged away, back to that forsaken place where the black memories swarmed, where she had met nothing but doom, to be used and dragged and caged in again.

She had utterly and completely lost any however flimsy control she'd ever had over her life, obediently marching to her doom like a pretty little puppet; She was trapped as a prisoner in her own skin, and she was suffocating, and she'd chosen this, and yet, every fiber of her being cried out that she didn't, that she didn't deserve this, that this was perverse and unfair and that she'd done nothing that could possibly justify this much injustice and indignity.

All of this because she'd once gone into the woods when she shouldn't have, because she'd only ever wanted to go home...

And just like that, she'd reached the point where she couldn't take it anymore, and just as she'd left the holding cell behind her, she couldn't stop herself from sinking to her knees.

"No..." she whimpered, first quietly, then with increasing intensity and urgency. "Don't make me go back! You can't! Please, please, I beg of you, don't make me go back... I already told you everything I knew... I'll tell you more if you want, but don't bring me back there."

"Eugh!" the warrior scoffed, eyes narrowed. "Will you quit this pathetic display already? It's unbecoming."

"Listen, " the technician attempted. "I don't want to go back there, either. In fact, that makes three of us. But it can't be helped. It's our assignment. The quicker we get this over with, the quicker we'll be done with it. "

But Lapis no longer cared about status or any assignments; Those things were long beyond her, and to see how they could still care about these kinds of things and give them importance when she was falling apart right in front of them just increased her disgust for their callouness and pride. She didn't want to have to look at their faces anymore.

She didn't want to get into a spaceship with them, and she most certainly didn't want to go with them.

"Please!" she implored, quite aware that she could not expect mercy from their cold hard faces, but incapable of accepting the inevitability that came with that certainty. "Don't make me go back to Earth! They kept me trapped there... for so long! I-I never wanted to fight, but, the rebellion happened and... Please, no more.

I don't want to go back to earth! Don't bring me anywhere near the Earth... I can't do this, not again... Please, not Earth. Don't make me! Anywhere but Earth!"

"You don't want to go back to Earth, you say?" the warrior repeated, her voice still rough and intense even when she wasn't yellling for a moment, leaving her to believe for a brief glimmer of a moment that against all odds, she might still have a chance.

"Well how about this... **NONE OF US GET WHAT WE WANT!** "

Lapis recalled catching a split-second glance of the warrior's eyes, so far narrowed in superiority, widening as far as they would go in that sudden moment, as if something wild and feral had taken possession of her.

She'd acted aggressive before, in the manner of a cocky bully carelessly throwing their weight around, but this was something different – Her perfect face was contorted into an ugly mask of disgust, like something she'd just seen had sparked some fundamental, visceral revulsion, and the wrath in her eyes was old and possibly more boundless as Lapis' own, what more, they glowed the white-hot, zealous fever gleam of righteous fury, as if her violent heart were screaming to the heavens for retribution over some unpunished injustice from long, long ago, and in that moment, she was not a bloodthirsty berserker or a superior conqueror, but a crusading, shining Paladin coming to purge the heathens, and Lapis knew enough of injustice and unfairness to recognize at first glance that her grievance had been legitimate, that she'd been wronged.

In that moment, for a fraction of a second, she was the most terrifying thing Lapis Lazuli had ever seen.

And before she knew anything else, she felt her form crashing back-first into a wall with extreme prejudice, impacting with her whole body and a thunderous sound before collapsing to an unsightly heap on the floor.

Her physical form held out, but just barely.

All sounds were sounding oddly muffled on her right side, there was a ringing all over her back and head, and when she felt for those parts of her face that felt like fire had gotten caught in them, she realized that the surface layer had been scraped off in places from the sheer force of the blow, some of it hanging off off her in ribbons.

Shaken as much from the pain as from the sheer brutality of the act, she strained to make her eyes follow the path she shad taken, until they were met with a creature that was in every way her opposite;

Where Lapis was slender and delicate, she was massive and imposing;

Where she was resigned, the other was still burning with violent anger.

Where she had offensive long-range abilities, this warrior was a nigh-indestructible fighter

Where she'd hung on to her identity like it was the most precious thing she had, this being was proud to call herself a tool and a monster.

Even their coloration were opposites, as were the placement of her gems; Lapis' own rested on her back, as if her whole body were a cautious bastion to; This Quartz wore it plain on her face as she charged into battle, head-first into the danger.

And yet, before was an individual whose entire life had, without doubt, been defined by her abnormal powers and the strife she'd been thrown in because of that.

Before her was someone who knew she could trust and rely on no one.

She was seething with the endless fantasies of vengeance and destruction that could only be matched by someone who had been bereft of something she could never regain, but unlike Lapis, she had no intention to leave them as just fantasies.

In some dark corner of her mind, she felt almost a perverse kind of envy, for how carelessly she affected her surroundings, how she hadn't flinched to release the full extent of her ugly wrath like that; how she didn't hesitate to flaunt all of her monstrous power, how her face had split open into a predatory grin before attacking, twisted with insatiable, obscene wanting.

What if Lapis were to let herself cut loose, could she let herself lose control like that...?

Then she noticed something:

Beneath the warrior's left foot, where she'd to balance and gather the force for her punch, there were cracks in the floor.

It took a while for the significance if this to register; Lapis had spent so much time on Earth, where everything was extremly breakable and easily damaged, but, they were on homeworld right now. Everything here was designed with gems in mind and should be able to withstand all manner of punishment...

And yet, this gem had left cracks in the floor.

"What IS she?!" she couldn't help but exclaim.

The warrior smirked in satisfaction – Before Lapis could gather herself up, she was seized and pulled to her feet by a fist nearly the sight of her head, possibly the very one that had smacked her, bringing upon her the indignity to suffer being dangled like a thing and inspected like caught prey.

"This," the quartz indicated, gesturing to her face with her free arm "Is called 'a Jasper'. "

Her features hardened again, and after schooting one more quick, disgusted look, the warrior threw her aside like a toy she'd grown bored of.

Still weak from the earlier beatdown, Lapis Lazuli struggled to keep her balance, but, she managed, albeit hanging on to the wall.

"Look at yourself!" she sneered, gesturing uncomfortably close to the smaller blue gem. "How can you stand to be so pathetic? You were supposed to be a powerful aristocrat, the pride of homeworld... Instead you have gone and forfeit your birthright with your disobedience. You, who should be an example for the masses to look upon... You're not anything anymore!"

And if to underline her point, she took the liberty of giving her staggering captive another brusque shove, forcing the smaller gem to use both arms in order to cling to the wall.

"Nothing but a disgrace to us all! And for what? Because you 'Don't want to go back?' Seriously?"

Irately slamming her mighty arm on said wall and resting it there, the warrior leaned closer, uncomfortably close.

Lapis felt some of her hair grazing her shoulder, as coarse and unruly as the rest of her, and there she was, right there, staring into her eyes from above, still burning inside with violent rage, and the blue gem could not help but tremble in her presence.

It was not that she was incapable of fighting back, or that she didn't have the power; Rather, her will had been so thoroughly broken that it barely even occurred to her, leaving her forced to listen to her tormenter's taunts:

"What were you expecting, sympathy? You were told what to do, and you didn't do it! We're at war! No one has any time left for this pathetic display anymore, not in this world or any other. If you were of any lesser status, you would be in shards right now. Do you understand,brat?"

Terrified, Lapis nodded.

Having gotten the domination she'd wanted, the Quartz stepped away and turned on her heels, marching straight through the room in the direction of the door, forcing Peridot to scramble out of her way in the process.

"W-wait, Jasper-"

"Don't make me wait." the large soldier merely instructed her, without paying the technician any further mind.

As far as she was concerned, she would come when she felt like it, and leave when she felt like it.

"Eh, wait for me at the airlock, okay? Jasper? Jasper!"

the door closed behind her before she showed any signs of responding to the younger gem's appeals.

"Goodness, what an exhausting individual!" she commented, stopping short of using her usual barrage of colorful language towards so high-ranking a superior. "Does she just go around smashing things everywhere she goes?"

Once she'd gotten that off her chest, she turned her attention to Lapis.

"I still have a blaster, et cetera, so don't try anything."

But Lapis could not even have thought of fleeing or fleeing or resisting- she was too caught up in shivering about the being she'd just met and the scene she'd just witnessed – so much that even Peridot realized that she'd be suficiently docile on the way to their shapeship, and thus turned her attention to the next most pressing concern – the cracks in the flooring.

"Stay where you are, let it not be said that I don't leave the facilities in proper condition." grabbing a flask with a clear, bluish liquid before bending down to have a look.

"Dear Diamonds, she cracked through the entire coating!" the green gem exclaimed in disbelief, spreading the viscous goo inside the container she'd taken over the crack in order to seal it.

"I don't get it." she spoke, to one one in particular, by the looks of it not much perturbed by the scene she'd just seen transpiring before her. Though after everything that just took place in that room, the technicians continued presence and ramblings weren't even significant enough to add insult to injury; Still, she babbled on. "If she doesn't want to go to Earth, why'd she even sign up for this mission? She's a Quartz, they get a lot more freedom regarding what missions they get to take, especially the high-ranking ones. As I understand it, my Diamond would have contacted available officers of the necessary skill level and asked for volunteers." the technician mused. "And the nerve, too, to waltz in here and act all high and mighty. She's not even one of Yellow Diamond's gems, I bet they just took her in because she'd make an interesting specimen..."

Once she saw that the cracks were properly sealed, the green gem stood up and turned to leave.

"Geez... I get the feeling that this is going to be a long, long trip... "

* * *

~Estuans Interius Ira Vehementi

Estuans Interius Ira Vehementi

Sors immanis

Et Inanis

Veni, veni veni, venias

ne me mori facias

Gloriosa, Generosa

(Still burning inside with violent anger

His fate is monstrous and empty

Come, come, come, please come, glorious one

Don't let me die, noble one)~


	8. VIII (The Homeland)

_~Tired of dull ages, I walk the same ground,_  
 _Collecting the tragedies still_  
 _Hollow ambitions in a hollow mind_  
 _Carried my cross to the hill_

 _And how I lust for the dance and the fire_  
 _Deep of the nectarine sunset to drink_  
 _Spill me the wind and its fire_  
 _To steal of the colors - I'm the moonshield_

 _Shattered hope became my guide_  
 _And grief and pain my friends_  
 _A brother pact in a blood-ink penned_  
 _Declare my silent end_

 _Naked and dying under worlds of silent stone_  
 _Reaching for the moonshield that once upon us shone~_

 _VIII._

It felt like being paraded around even if it wasn't, really;

The small technician only walked her through a few corridors of the large, seemingly labyrinthine facility she worked in, warped them straight to the space dock, and, up there, used mostly the smaller, less pompous corridors and walkways intended for service personnel, perhaps out of simple habit or some sense that they were where she was 'supposed' to walk; Under less dire circumstances, she might have felt curious and playful about exploring the less frequented parts of the dock and take a look at all the service ducts, fuel tubes and access panels which the designers of the technology had hidden from view to give an impression of effortlessness; In her day, Lapis would have used the large, ornate promenade decks of such space stations, far from any place a Peridot would have worked in; It was a part of homeworld she'd never really seen and thus didn't have any preconceived ideas for this distant future to obliterate;

But under these circumstances, everything about being here was nothing but an unbearable indignity, prohibiting any feeling beyond despair, wrath, frustration and a growing icy emptiness that remained as all the other things began to burn themselves up.

Far from any remnant of aristocratic pride, it was her inescapable awareness of just what she was doing here, and just was she was in regards to her surroundings that transformed these walls into a hell she wanted nothing to do with:

There may not have been any chains trailing from her wrists and ankles, but she was trapped wherever she went, so there may as well have been.

There didn't need to be chains for anyone who saw her – and she _was_ seen, by at least a handful smaller, lower-ranked service gems that had gone their way – even if they'd avoided the busiest areas of the orbital station – to notice just how far she'd fallen from the grace she'd once held, a broken, clipped-winged angel that had tumbled from the skies.

The very fact that she was in that place, being led around by a simple Peridot, was enough to tell anyone what happened, and though what little company they had knew better than to gawk openly, Lapis Lazuli could practically feel their stares on her back, perhaps checking if the gemstone situated there was indeed what they thought it was; For someone like that to wind up there, she'd have to have been a prisoner, on some small, petty charge that didn't merit having a flashy example made out of her;

And just to top it off, she had to endure all of this while her face was in pieces.

Sure, as her gemstone itself had been unscathed, she did heal with relative swiftness – though complete rest would have been preferable, she wasn't exactly performing a strenuous task, she could gradually feel the aches in her joints and head fading and the scrapes on her form closing up, but the lacerations that the warrior's fist had left behind in her face took a little longer and had still been quite visible by the time they reached the actual docking ring, whose corridors were somewhat larger again to accommodate all kinds of military gems, many of which passed them as Peridot paused to activate her screens and ascertain that they had reached the right place with a quick peek at the station's schematics.

Always in need of more conquests, the gems that made up the empire's troops were among the most numerous and most varied, and there were quite a lot of them passing this junction, including a dozen of common Ruby foot-soldiers who were tinier than even Lapis and her captor, though significantly stockier than both, some of which curiously eyed the sight of an aristocratic gem in such a place until their superiors shot them down, one of them even turning back to look at the disgraced blue gem as if she felt sorry for her.

On the other end up the spectrum there had been a pair of towering Amethysts wielding a studded mace and an axe respectively, one of which had actually had the gall to laugh, until her comrade had stopped her by lightly elbowing her in the side, only to make a spiteful remark of her of her own, leading both to lightly snicker to each other and proceed to go about their ways.

Lapis Lazuli couldn't make out what exactly they were saying, but the sight of their faces was enough.

The little technician leading her along had been too immersed in her maps to really notice her surroundings, and eventually gestured for her to follow like nothing ever happened.

With the occasional cautious glance to make sure that her prisoner was obediently tagging along, the younger gem continued on her path in a steady stride now certain of the direction, making sure to pause and salute if she came by anyone high-ranking, such as the Amethysts from earlier or a large Spinel folowed by a Pearl attendant, whom the small green gem notably _didn't_ attempt to greet.

One could make a reasonable guess that even the higher-ups thought she was overdoing it in following protocol to the theoretical utmost, but pathetic as it seemed, it was not all that unnatural for a being who lived in a world where almost everyone was larger and stronger than her.

Protocol and theory was all she had, all that let her have any significance at all; And the harsh truth was, with that, she had a lot more significance and status than Lapis herself did at the moment.

She may just have been a technician, but a technician she _was_.

She was, at the very least, higher than this Pearl, most certainly higher than all those untouchables that did not have a place in the hierarchy at all, she had a function, a purpose that she could cling to, a puny, easily waived handful of rights, and she was sure assuring to get the full mileage out of it, clinging to that and polishing it; By mantaining like every tiny rule was important, every breach unacceptable, she was that _she_ was important, something none of the more decadent elites had any need of doing, leaving them more space to bend the rules – And to begin with, one such as them... one such as Lapis herself! – would have been given more leniency than one of this technician's status; That monstrous Quartz had said it herself: Were she of any lesser status – not even as far down as a Peridot! – she would have been treated far, far worse, maybe even shattered.

Perhaps that privilege and leniency was the only reason why she didn't remember her faraway youth as something abominable.

But those days were long past, and whatever birthrights may have been reserved for them, right now, it was Lapis who was bent, bruised and subjugated, trailing beyond this small green technician who walked with her head held high, and could afford to do it exactly because she bowed or saluted to the right people, presenting her ridiculous triangle of hair like a peacock's tail.

Even if it was the only thing she had, or was good for, even if she didn't have nearly as much as the mighty warrior she'd been bossed around by earlier, she had _something_ , she had a role to play: She was a technician, and the empire needed technicians – she was a Peridot and she would never be anything more, but she wasn't anything less, and no one could take that from her, so even though the system did not favor her the way it did an elite, or even a warrior, she clung to what little it DID say she was, with all her might.

And to her own detached disgust, Lapis understood.

She understood now.

If you're miserable, you need someone who's more miserable than yourself – For this little imp, that was that unfortunate Pearl she chose not to grace with a look. For that hulking savage from before, it was just about everyone unfortunate enough to cross paths with her.

Such misery could well be the glue that kept homeworld's society sticking together, the oil making it slide, pumping through it's veins...

But who was there, either here or on the planet below, whom Lapis could have called miserable?

By its standards, she was, indeed, not anything anymore, and though no one wanted to be caught rejoicing in what, in theory, never ought to happen, there were many resentful hearts hungry for a glance at how the mighty had fallen.

The technician may have prided herself of her role because she had nothing else, but as it stood, Lapis had nothing at all, apart from the memory of a time when it hadn't been so, simmering away all beauty within her, much more permanently than the warrior's harsh blow could have tarnished her outer one; Unsightly as they were, the wounds had closed by the time she reached the dock.

Humiliating as it was for the breaches in her skin to be exposed to everyone's delight, she almost missed them when they were gone, because the pain and humiliation was still there, except now, it looked like nothing had ever happened, and she almost wished the warrior had broken her even worse.

And of all her foolish, futile wishes, that one had the best chances of becoming reality, a realization that covered her skin like growing, crystallizing frost at the sight she found before her when she reached her captor's destination, the fear of what might yet transpire came over her like the weight of endless torrential waters:

There she was, in all her titanic size and herculean might, with the dominance of a blizzard and the arrogance of an ice queen, even the silver hair that spilled down her back resembled viscous spikes, displeasure and impatience plain on her face, stepping down with her left heel time and time again to announce her dislike of waiting.

The herculean gem sat right next to the airlock doors, of course ready and in place, sitting on a chest of what had to be her belongings, a simple thing patterned in red and dark magenta that seemed to be made out of fancy enough materials to befit someone of her station, but not nearly as ornate or large as her reputation would have suggested;

Some of the higher ranking Quartzes would own armories full of fancy tools and lethal implements, or bring a collection of the prizes of their conquests, both trophies seized from the enemy and material honors bestowed by their superiors.

This one seemed to prefer to travel with light luggage; If she owned any such things, she had chosen not to show it around, perhaps because she did not believe that this mission would occupy her for long, maybe she was a bit of a minimalist, or perhaps this was yet another symptom of her nature as a fully embraced fiend, and her preferences were, in every sense of the word, _spartan_ ;

Perhaps she preferred to tear apart her foes with the mighty force of her bare body for the most part, maybe she liked to splatter unfortunate organics with her fists, to break them apart and bathe in their fluids, or crush their skeletons with a flexing of her limbs; Lived she not only for destruction? So why should she love splendor, when it didn't serve to intimidate?

She likely needed less in terms of rest and comforts than even her fellow gems, or her fellow warriors for that matter, and she didn't seem interested in pretending like she did when she could rather push her own limits, or flaunt her lack thereof, a theory that would have been supported by a closer look at the chest, especially as the warrior stood up from it, revealing that the lid still sported the _old_ version of the Diamond Authority symbol, the one Lapis herself was familiar with and conditioned to associate with authority and majesty, what more, the chest itself showed signs of age, the occasional scratch in the varnish or a missing tile in its humble decorations, but its owner did not seem to have deemed it necessary to replace it, though she must have been using it for a long, long time.

Though she hadn't packed much, she'd certainly gotten herself ready, as apparent from the destabilizer now resting on her hip, a larger version of what the crew of the patrol ship had wielded, the ones who brought her here in the first place;

Now, Lapis was about to leave homeworld once again, and though there had been little for her to recognize and even less for her to miss, she still resented the forcible parting; maybe it was the principle of the thing, right there in the 'forcible' part;

And there was no word better than 'forcible' to describe this newest 'companion' they were supposed to bring with them on this accursed 'mission' that had caused everything to turn out so bleak;

Having to stare at the technician's face and put up with her shrill voice and insensitive ramblings would have been bad enough, but having to suffer the warrior was just devoid of all mercy;

Even encountering her once had been far, far too much;

Certainly enough to make her wish to never have to see her again, to never again have to experience being in the same room with her, not the sight and sound, none the feelings, thoughts and temptations that her presence made her consider.

But though she wasn't chained, she might as well have been, the walls and halls and creatures living in these had become the walls of her tomb.

She could have run, she could have flown, but _where to?_ Wouldn't she have been pierced with too many weapons to count before she had any hopes of getting anywhere?

She hadn't technically been paraded around, but she might as as well have been served on a silver platter, ready to be taken;

The tangerine gem turned to acknowledge their steps, just as Lapis feared she would, and for a moment, she felt her intense, penetrating glare upon her and when their gazes met, it was a crushing thing that lasted far too long with every fraction of an instant that it continued, and it was a mercy when she finally turned to address the technician, causing _her_ to flinch involuntarily at the Jasper's harsh millstone-voice: "Let's get going! This is shaping up to be a waste of time as it is."

Subtly irked, Peridot activated her screens and after a few 'clicks' with the one finger that remained behind for further input, the airlock doors opened.

Though without doubt more than strong enough to carry her possessions herself without the slightest effort, it did not even occur to the warrior to lift her box off the ground in the presence of a lower-ranking gem; She thought so little about it that she didn't even give an order, simply leaving it behind to march past the threshold as a matter of habit; Of course, the younger gem – who, as the lower-ranking among a crew of two, would have to get stuck with all duties unworthy of her superior's time, but hell would freeze over before would be seen bending down to carry anything – Lesser as it was, she had her status, too, and that was one of a _technician,_ a highly specialized task compared to that of a worker or servant, and thus, she wound up lifting the box with the tractor beam device contained in one of her mechanical arms, making it float behind the three of them as they boarded the ship even though the chest's dimensions did not make this measure strictly necessary.

If the green gem had any luggage of her own, she must have brought it when came aboard for her earlier inspections, that is, if one such as her was even likely to possess anything beyond the tools and machinery assigned to her.

As for the ship itself, it was reminiscent of the one that dragged Lapis here, with green walls and corridors, and large tubes running along both, the simplistic geometric shapes in the wall-lining, the large depictions of the new diamond authority emblem, though it was probably a great deal larger and better armed; In the end, none of that mattered to Lapis very much, for she didn't doubt that a warship like this would contain plenty of holding cells for them to throw her in and forget her there, until they came to Earth, that is.

Who knew what would happen there; As long as her captors had their fancy warship, the rebels were probably in greater trouble than Lapis herself was, but there was at least a chance that she might once again be lost in the shuffle and trampled underfoot, a single, insignificant causality to an one-sided struggle on a soon-to-be-destroyed backwater planet.

There wasn't a clear unavoidable reason why it _must_ be so, but after all the ways in which odds had conspired to hold her down ever before, the blue gem didn't trust her luck.

Rightfully certain that she'd keep obediently marching to her doom, her captors didn't even pay much attention to her as they discussed their mission among themselves; In particular, it was the technician who considered making an inquiry as they made their way through the vessel.

"So tell me, soldier, since you're the expert … Is there anything to keep in mind about the Earth that might not have been in the records? Any places to avoid? Any freak atmospheric conditions to watch out for?Can you tell me anything about that planet that could be of strategical value?"

"Don't concern yourself with _strategy_ , even if you could possibly understand what you're speaking of, those defective would hardly merit its use." the warrior declared, more grimly than scolding.

There'd only two things you need to know about fighting rebels: Don't listen to any of their talk, they speak only madness." she declared, ominously. "And most important of all: Don't get taken alive."

For once, Lapis was tempted to agree with her. Don't get taken alive, not by rebels, not by homeworld, not by anyone. In fact, she'd recommend to die in such a way that they cannot even recover your shards; Blow yourself up, make sure you get pulverized and buried, so no one in this universe can ever make use of you again, or drag you back into their war, or otherwise make you wish you could die as easily as the organics.

The blue gem half expected the technician to audibly gulp or something, with the other half counting on her dismissing the soldier's accounts as one of the tall tales were wont to spin, with the archetypical pride that goeth before a fall, but her actual response subverted all her expectations, as the way she spoke was actually surprisingly serious: "I already know they're _traitors,_ and probably deviants to boot. As you said, I'm not a warrior. I would never presume to be. But I am still a loyal subject to my Diamond. I can assure you that I find them just as reprehensible as you do. That's exactly why I need all information I can get to keep them from delaying my mission any further, in any way I can. You've been asking why they sent you, well, that's why! Because you because you have experience with that planet."

"You've been there much more recently than I have, or so I'm told."

"Only very briefly."

"And what did you see there?"

"Well, ruins. Everything in disrepair. In fact, when I accessed the Galaxy warp, I could have sworn that every single panel had been deliberately and systematically smashed... "

Just a mention of the place where she'd been abandoned was enough to make the feelings and memories resurface in her mind, and take Lapis back to the spot where she'd wasted away longing for freedom, that one, unchanging view she'd been forced to state at for so long, so close to a way out, yet so impossibly removed from it.

If the rebels had not made very sure that 'their' planet would be isolated, would anyone had come looking for her, or even have found her by accident?

"They certainly smashed it after I left. Like all other usable technology in their vicinity!" the green gem continued. "Just... indiscriminate, wanton destruction. That's what I've been trying to tell you!" the technician affirmed emphatically."I wonder why they would do such a thing. Do they think they can keep us from accessing the planet?"

"What makes you think they have any reason at all?" the warrior interjected. "That you expect them to listen to reason like any sort of civilized beings just proves that you have no idea what you're dealing with... If you've seen those ruins, you've seen all there's left to see of that planet.

The leader of the rebellion made very, very sure of that..."

"Their leader?"

"Rose Quartz." the Jasper spoke with utmost contempt and just a bit of ancient hatred spilling out around the fringes. "That's what she may have been when she first emerged, but what she ended up _becoming_ could hardly be called a gem anymore, let alone a Quartz. She turned into the very antithesis of everything she was ever supposed to be, nothing less than sacrilege incarnate... but she wasn't always that way...

Before she did all these unspeakable things, long before she committed the ultimate transgression, she came from very humble beginnings...

She was supposed to be a warrior, made on that accursed hunk of rock like countless others. I've been told that the kindergarteners that first examined her back when she was first made didn't find anything unusual about her, no abnormalities, not even signs unusual prowess; She was just another Rose Quartz, indistinguishable from countless others – Her early progress reports even describe her as hard-working and surpassing expectations, everything she was supposed to be: powerful, fierce, tenacious and above all, loyal... but they were very, very mistaken.

Following her betrayal, many of homeworld's brightest and foremost searched through all available records to find out how something like her betrayal could ever have happened, and if there way any way to avoid how such mistakes could be avoided in the future, but there was nothing they could ever find; By all accounts, the only reason for all the devastation wrought upon our empire was that she _felt like it_. That she simply did whatever she wanted, that she was different because she _decided_ to be, and didn't give a damn about the consequences." the warrior narrated, her face grim even by her standards.

"There was a time where the only things that were considered odd about her was her tendency to spent her time socializing with some of her lower-ranking underlings, or take long walks through the organic forests when she was off-duty. No one grasped the full extent her madness until it was too late. No one could imagine that a Quartz could possibly turn against her own liege, let alone tempt others to follow in her footsteps, but she _did_.

If she had been sensible, she could have lived a comfortable life of honor and status, protecting her colony and claiming new worlds in glorious conquest for the empire; She would have been respected and served by those below and won the recognition of those above.

But that wasn't enough for her. No. Far from it."

The warrior's lips broke into a bitter smile.

"She was of high station from the moment she was made, one of the first and foremost in a new and flourishing colony, and yet, she wasn't satisfied. That one fancied herself an aristocrat; Perhaps even a Diamond. Instead of bearing her uniform, she dressed like a noble; It is said that she even fetched herself some lost, defective Pearl from one of the battlefields and trained her as an assassin, bringing her into battle with her, where the pitiful thing would proceed to throw herself in the way of every blade including those her master could have easily withstood.

Sometimes, there were even claims that they charged into battle as a fusion... A Quartz and a _Pearl_ , can you imagine?"

The Peridot cringed. "Seriously, a _Pearl_?"

"And that wasn't even the exception for that lot. Even a monster like Rose couldn't have caused this much destruction just with her own two hands...the worst, most disgraceful, most revolting thing about Rose Quartz was her crazed flock of fanatic followers, and the silver tongue she used to ensnare them to her ways."

"Why would anyone in their right mind follow her?" the younger gem couldn't help but blurt out.

"They wouldn't. That's why she was completely indiscriminate: She took _everything,_ all the deviants, the defects, the transgressors; She tempted them with perverted tales of what they could have if they, too, turned against their masters... You'd find _anything_ among her lackeys _,_ everything from the simplest Ruby to the lofty Sapphire, intermingling with no semblance or order.

You would not have believe the sights, you'd see Amethysts taking orders from Bismuths, Agates and Spinels doing labor, gems that were never meant for battle struggling to hold weapons in any way they could... of course they must have known that they could never win against gems that were _made_ for battle, so instead of facing us in fair fights, they would come at us in huge, towering fusions, misshapen, unsightly things with twisting shapes the Diamonds never intended for.

As if of that weren't enough, they simply refused to die.

Back when I fought in the war, we were ordered to thoroughly shatter every single enemy, and if possible, to bring back their shards. And do you know why? Because if one did anything less, those same crystal gems would end up coming back as if nothing ever happened; Failing to crush them completely would be the same as not defeating them at all;

Somehow, it seems Rose Quartz had obtained some kind of power that could bring her lackeys back from the brink. Even though we outnumbered them by far, they cut down our soldiers faster than our side could grow them, while we struggled just to inflict lasting casualties on them.

Rose Quartz was supposed to have been a honorable fighter, but instead, she never ceased to come up with more varieties of trickery and deviation.

She was particularly fond of growing her own creatures from the local organic life and unleashing them in battle... I don't know if it was because she relished in having her minions worship the worthless, tainted dirt she'd sprung from, but it's said that she had a particular obsession with Earth's organic life; Some of the more intelligent ones were even seen with her armies sometimes, and there were rumors that she'd go into their dwellings to practice in their rituals as if she were one of them... some even that she would take those primitive beasts as her consorts!

What I know for a fact is that the rebels went through some effort to make the makeup of their physical form mimic those of those creatures... they were so obsessed with that worthless garbage planet, as if there was anything on it that could have possibly justified turning on their own kind... Damned if I know what could have possibly possessed her to chose those hairy brown apes over her fellow gems, to go against everything she was, the very fabric of her being...

Maybe she just really hates herself or something, like it even matters...

Though for all that garbage she'd speak, about how she'd 'outgrown' her programming and never spent a moment missing the homeworld, she never ceased to be a fighter.

As sick as she was, as much as she constantly seemed to top herself with how far she would sink and what lines she'd be willing to cross, I can't deny that she was a worthy opponent and an excellent general. She was willing to use everything at her disposal to bring her objective to completion; She had the courage to reach her ends by any means. I have to give her respect for that, at least.

No matter how many shards she scattered, or what sanctions she brought down on herself and her sycophants, she got her wish: We abandoned the colony, and what little remained of its residents were stripped of their homeland.

The Earth could have been a flourishing bastion of our empire, and what is it now? Just a disgrace!

Soon, it will be nothing but a cautionary tale, an example of the chaos and destruction that ensue when a gem attempts to reshape herself outside her purpose, and of it's futility.

She didn't want to be a soldier, and yet, she caused the most devastating war in the history of the empire?

What a farce!"

"But if she's so dangerous, isn't it a good thing that my Diamond sent me this ship and yourself?" the green gem asked in slight confusion, displaying a kind of bile fascination toward the warrior's narrative but still thinking primarily of her mission.

"Not at all!" the soldier replied. "Weren't you listening? That whole lot is nothing but defects and deviants. Without Rose Quartz to lead them, they're essentially decapitated."

"And what if she **is** still alive after all?"

Slapping one fist into her other palm, the Quartz bared her teeth in a grin.

"Then perhaps this trip won't have been a waste of my time after all." Again, there was that wild, wide-eyed expression on her face, that feverish sense of _wanting._ "I've been itching to kill her for a good five thousand years. "

Then, she seemed to catch herself in the act, not in such a way that she would have acted embarrassed – that, she probably considered beneath her – it was more like she just casually remembered that she'd decided to act superior and blasé about this, and shifted her position with a vaguely concluding "Hmpf..."

"I never thought I'd get the chance, and I still don't think there's very much of one. Don't delude yourself, the only reason Yellow Diamond approved your request is that she wants to leave no doubt that even rumors of the rebellion's continued existence will be met with the utmost force, to expunge any doubt that anything we found down there was thoroughly squashed. You from the technical division wouldn't know his, but my name holds some weight with the troops. It's nothing but a display meant to showcase a zero-tolerance policy. In other words, there's no need for me or a warship of this caliber to actually be here, and the latter would have been enough for show if you hadn't requested backup...

Speaking of your mission, why don't you find some holding cell to throw this brat into, and get about plotting our course once you're done?"

Distinctly un-impressed, the technician sighed quietly, putting down her superior's the tractor beam'd luggage.

"Alright. Let's begin. For the Diamonds, and the glory of the empire."

Despite her professional at first, she mustered some impassioned intensity for that final statement which she punctuated with a salute, presumably as demanded by protocol when one was about to carry out one's first formal direct order in the beginning of a new operation.

"For the Diamonds!" the warrior acknowledged, actually acknowledging her without further putdown for a moment, though most certainly not for long. "Now get moving!"

Not bothering to threaten her explicitly this time, the green gem merely gestured for Lapis to follow her, and led her away.

They left the glass-domed atrium that her captors had paused to talk in by one of the many corridors that left here, and as they did, Lapis' eyes lingered on the old diamond authority emblem on the warrior's container of personal belongings as they passed it – Especially in contrast with the new symbol engraved in the floor and the green walls all around them, simply because it was a lone remnant of a time she could have recognized.

All that talk of the Earth war had certainly stirred up memories, and none of them were pleasant.

Personally, she'd never really believed in the Earth colony or found it worthy of the lengthy fight that had been carried out over it, certainly not to the extent as seeing it as the matter of fundamental principle that the warrior was portraying it as – then again, what could one really expect of these military types?

It was very apparent to her that at least this particular quartz relished in the taking of life and would take any justification or explanation, perhaps exaggerating the conflict's importance to make herself look grander for emerging intact from its crucible, or maybe it really was that hellish and she'd immensely enjoyed taking part for precisely that reason – the antics her many interrogators for the length of the war had certainly given her a rough indication of how the war had been going, but what little she'd been able to piece together while she'd been frantically and futilely trying to give some indication of her true identity amounted to little more, or even _less_ than the account the warrior had just given – but at least this warrior had been _meant_ for fighting, at least she'd gotten a chance to confront the enemy instead of finding herself trapped in utter impotence, as Lapis still was to this day...

Though it was a relief to be out of the warrior's presence once they turned around the corner, it wasn't like the presence of the technician had become an attractive option by that comparison, especially since she insisted on speaking pretty much as soon as they were out of her earshot.

Lapis Lazuli expected her to complain, but instead, she asked a question:

"Did you see that box of hers?"

When Lapis didn't reply, the green gem didn't seem overly displeased, mot likely because she was satisfactorily confident in what she'd been able to piece together by herself.

"It still has her old colors. One the one hand I'm surprised that this has been allowed, even if she's a quartz. To display this while she serves among us, in one of our uniforms, seems a bit... irreverent, doesn't it?"

Lapis did not know or care what she could be referring to.

"On the other hand, who could forbid her? Her original allegiance is too binding, even if she can no longer fulfill it... I know _I_ could never forget the gem I was made for, not that she could ever possibly fall..."

"what do you mean by that," Lapis finally commented, more as a quiet, understated complaint than a real question of interest; It was almost _amazingly_ inconsiderate of this gem to chipperly tell her something about 'not belonging anywhere' like it was some curious funfact laced with at most a distant superior pity when neither she nor her buff, abrasive companion were the ones being escorted to a cell, and Lapis had long resigned herself into playing along, but she couldn't help herself from growing weary of it.

Maybe one of these days, she would tire, and actually fight back.

"Haven't you noticed? I thought you of all people would realize. She's a survivor from Pink Diamond's court!"

There it was again, the mystery that was Pink Diamond's absence from the newer symbol; At this point Lapis barely cared, though from that comment and the use of the word 'survivor', it was implied that 'Pink Diamond's court' was indeed not something that existed anymore – which explained why the younger gem had referred to the Jasper as an 'outsider' earlier.

All Lapis knew was that Pink Diamond, also known as the Lady of Hosts and a variety of other fearsome epithets, had been the one to propose and lead the colonization of Earth, and ruled over it from her base on Earth's large moon, the nightly presence of the silvery sphere itself a regular sight charged with meaning, intended to remind gems on Earth of their sovereign's titanic majesty and omnipresent wakeful eye;

The colony had been intended as a breeding ground for the extensive and efficient mass-productions of troops, intended to much quicken the pace of empire's expansion; Instead, its progress ended up being stalled by the civil war – But could the godlike matriarch truly have fallen?

In all the years Lapis had spent trapped beneath a sight of complete stillness, apart from the shifting of the celestial body she was being shined on, she could only conclude that the bases on Earth's pale satellite must also have gone silent, so what meaning did the sight of the crater-scarred citadel mean now?

What had defeat made of the iconic bastion that once shone upon them, or those who once lived to be its shields?

"Can you imagine that? To not belong anywhere?" the technician asked, more with the sort of dark glee one would show while discussing some unthinkable, pitiful oddity than any sort of emphatic approach. "Absurd!" she concluded, almost snickering. "There's only very few of them left alive anymore, and the ones who are are scattered everywhere, but now and then, you see them..."

"How could they possibly be scattered?" Lapis spoke, more to herself and her own disbelief. "Sure, they lost the Earth, but surely she could find some other place to have more of them made?"

"You honestly don't know?" The younger gem exclaimed in genuine surprise. "But, you were there, on Earth..."

"I was trapped. In an object. I thought I told you. Don't you have that recorded on your machines somewhere?"

"But surely, someone must have mentioned... something like that..."

"Like what? What happened... to Pink Diamond?"

"We don't talk. About Pink Diamond. Neither do we ask questions." the technician suddenly admonished, forcing herself to maintain her composure, affecting some semblance of teacher-like strictness – By now, Lapis could tell that she must be attempting to copy whatever higher-ranked gem had used that same phrase to shoot down her own inquiries, to act like she was among the ones who were in the know, or at least, avoid a situation where she, a Peridot, whose function it was to contain knowledge, was forced to admit the ignorance she'd been kept in – perhaps she had heard this from her supervisor, or perhaps even the Uranite they both worked under.

Lapis realized that she most likely wasn't getting any serious information out of her, though the technician did her best to make it appear like she had plenty of relevant things to say: " _My_ Diamond, in her great efficiency and disdain of wastefulness, took in quite a lot of them as many of their territories fell to us. Jasper must be one of them. Though given where she came from, I wouldn't be surprised if she was only kept alive as a test subject. Sure, she seems to have a decent service record and I don't see anything _obviously_ wrong with her, but it's not like I'd get a chance to take a closer look, she's pretty tall and her gem is all the way up on her face... She could still have some pretty devastating flaws, though she seems to have done well, considering..."

"Flaws? That _thing_?" Lapis spat, too tired to bother hiding the disdain in her voice.

She couldn't have pictured the veteran as anything other than the ancient, cocky, lover of carnage she was now.

"Of course. All gems have their flaws and weaknesses in the end. Except the eternally flawless Diamonds, of course." the technician mused, unexpectedly. " To begin with, we're not designed with the the same tasks in mind, and different tasks set different requirements for which different tradeoffs must be made; A trait that's useful for one task might be useless or even counterproductive for another, and some features might be mutually exclusive. In the end, each and every of us does a necessary task for the empire that is necessary to maintain it, that's why all of us, even the lowliest ones, are needed, and that makes us all the same."

So _that_ was her dogma, what allowed her to keep her head high in a homeland where she was expected to live bowing so low – not technically blind obedience, though it was questionable where the difference lay –

For one thing, one doubted whether that speech would have included such members of gem society that were not commonly viewed as 'proper gems', such as fusions or Pearls. Or how much this theoretical underpinning of homeworld society related to its reality:

If one thing was obvious from the technician's interaction with the large military gem, it was that they _weren't_ considered 'the same'; And maybe but 'necessary task' became a callous euphemism or phony, intellectualized justification when one considered gems such as lowly Ruby guards who were treated as expendable, or Bismuth workers made to labor away at their overlord's whims;

But from the position of a highly specialized gem like this Peridot, this conception of the hierarchy must have seemed like a pretty, consistent, self-contained concept that meaning could be derived from and made sufficient sense for an astute, expansive mind like that necessary in her line of work would buy it and patch the holes in the system with its own creative rationalizations and conclusions, effectively outwitting itself too well to believe the simple, willful negligence inherent in the foundational ugly truth.

Lapis was reminded that for all her use of complicated words and well-conditioned, casual and callous acceptance of the horrors around her, the gem before her was still a naïve young neophyte unaware of the greater world beyond the niche she'd based all her sense of competence on.

A true believer possessed of a cruel, ignorant sort of innocence rather than whatever self-serving hypocritical doublethink the older veteran had going on to maintain her desired illusion that the world was fair and that all fortune coming her way and misfortune thrown in the way of others was somehow deserved, this little green twat would probably have sprouted you about what would have amounted to happiness and slavery and how the downtrodden were actually better off and better suited for their dire lots in life.

By the Stars, she was in for a rude awakening.

Neither of those two seemed to exist in the same reality as Lapis, nor did their ideas of a consequential, ordered world seem conflicted with the obvious

Had she once believed as they did, simply out of ignorance?

She honestly couldn't remember what, if anything, she'd believed, life had seemed so much simpler, seemed to make so much more sense...

For so long, she'd longed to return to her homeland but now that she was back, she could only see it as a disenchanted, ugly place saturated with an oppressive, depressing bleakness.

If she told those two, they might have speculate that Earth had somehow broken her, that what she was saying didn't make sense because she was defective, and that would spell her doom;

Lapis most certainly couldn't deny that the Earth had _changed_ her, perhaps in such a way that made it impossible for her to belong;

But at the same time it was very clear to her that homeworld had not treated her much more kindly than Earth, and as such, was clearly not something worthy of being longed for – What had either the Diamonds _or_ the rebels ever done for her?

She did not feel much of an allegiance toward either place at this point; Perhaps she should have been more careful with that she wished for, as the disappointing fulfillment of her wish to return

There should have been nothing left inside of her but emptiness a cold, burned-out rage, yet that would

Yes, even now as she'd found it to be nothing but a mirae, she couldn't stop herself from missing a homeland that may never have existed and or have been worthy of being missed; Nor even from beginning to miss it _again_ as Lapis and her captor passed its sight in the windows along the corridors.

With nothing before her but darkness, void and uncertainty, the mistreatment of the devil she knew almost felt like a kiss, which did nothing to mitigate the still standing fact that it wasn't one, and had given her nothing but new scars to decorate a soul blotched with her old ones instead of the healing and respite a home ought to offer.

Every instant in which the technician kept talking just confirmed Lapis' certainty that her being with all of the feelings contained therein had no room in this world.

"Though of course, warriors are supposed to be warriors, so it's not, per se, a problem if they lack things that they don't actually need – Just like Rubies don't need to be particularly bright, or like you or I do not need to be huge. Our sizes are, indeed, an indication of our rarity and importance, but it would be quite unacceptable if _she_ were this size.

But all that assumes an _ideal_ case, before the influences of realistic growing conditions feature in, and when it comes to her, well, her size is fine, actually quite impressive, but, under the circumstances, it would be _quite_ the extraordinary stroke of luck if that held true for everything about her makeup... Believe me, I know what I'm talking about." she explained, smugly. "I'm a certified kindergartener."

Yes. Lapis had noticed. She never shut up about it.

"Even under the best of conditions, perfect specimens are exceedingly rare. I have yet to see one in my entire career... And I've read _everything_ about the conditions _she_ had..." she stated, implying everything else with her impish, superior little smirk. "So let her have her pompous act, she's got nothing else. We've got to give it to her: She's a functional quartz soldier and no one can take that from her, even if she _has_ nowhere to go and wouldn't have been allowed to even be made if it hadn't been for the war..."

 _'You_ wouldn't have been allowed before the war', Lapis almost spat, but ended up keeping for herself; Not that she felt any sympathy for the warrior, if anything, that she could be among the last reminders of wherever she had come from just seemed to speak of her tenacity, and it did not endear her to Lapis that she probably would have been among those who had fought to the last over a colony she'd never deemed worth it, and certainly not worth what she personally had to endure because of both those who had spiked the war over it, and those who continued it for the sake of holding on to it;

But the _technician_ – all of her dripping smugness and condescension, her nerve to speak like this to someone she'd captured as if she expected her to applaud her, her insensitive callousness with which she treated everything indiscriminately, without a hint of feeling aside from her petty spite, the pitiful thing, barely an annoying imp next to the real proper devil that the veteran quartz had been –

Lapis could not stand it.

"You have an exit hole somewhere too, you know..." she simply stated in a low, disdainful voice, just because she was to tired not to do it.

She hadn't truly expected any empathy or remorse to cross the little green gremlin's face, but when she simply maintained her narrow, analytical look and choppy, discerning manner of speaking, it still stung all the same:

"I highly doubt it." she explained, coolly. "They would have cleared away pretty much right away to access the next usable rock layer, or at least by the point that anything still incubating in there would have gone bad... I don't actually remember it, but I can easily imagine, given that I experience the extent of my functionalities every day.

I would have been manufactured in what used to be the solidified remains of the outer mantle – The lineup was likely in order, the geometry suitable and the process itself all according to procedure, though I'd personally have made some adjustments to balance the deficiencies of the raw material. I'd wager that the cavity itself was it was likely on the smaller side though obviously still very much within acceptable parameters. It would probably have crumbled open more than it would have melted, I'm positive that the expulsion force and related marks can't have been too great, the consistency of the material as a whole was likely not nearly ductile enough, if not outright brittle..."

The dry, businesslike fashion in which she assessed her own life and the totality of what she might or might not archieve with it may or may not have been a facade or coping mechanism, but all the blue gem could feel was revulsion at how unnatural it seemed; She'd find it so cruel to hear someone speak of her like that, yet this little green drone did it like it was nothing, like it meant nothing? What sort of being would she had to be not to flinch at this?

All her words succeeded in doing was to rouse Lapis' disgust and make her yet more uncomfortable with turning her back to the technician's scrutinized expert eye, embarrassed and humiliating by just what flaws and weaknesses the simplest glance at her being's core might be exposing about herself, how it might be setting her up to be thought and talked about as a _thing_ yet more.

 _Everything_ was just _things_ to these two, and homeworld at large, things to be used, abused and exploited for the cause, or even just personal gain.

Neither of her captors seemed to shy away from talking even of _themselves_ as a things, the impersonal detachment of the technician being only surpassed by the warrior's _proud glee_ at being nothing but a war machine, a _monster_ even.

Even if you wanted to go out of your way to give it a more generous interpretation, you'd wind up with that little gremlin incessantly talking about herself, as if she had something to prove:

"But I can assure you that the ban was _more_ and I'd bet you everything that the mineral concentration gradients were not altogether unfavorable. I know I don't pack much of a punch, but I'm tough and I'm smart, and that's al all I need to be!" she technician helpfully supplied, for all who didn't get the jargon; Though, to be honest, the petty defensiveness underneath the farce of consummate professionalism was becoming rather apparent: "So you'd better not underestimate me!"

"You really like the sound of your own voice, do you? Why do you even keep rambling at me? What makes you think I care?" Lapis deadpanned.

Ohh, that seemed to have made her angry.

Like her ridiculous, impotent tantrums even meant anything.

She may have no way of resisting the warrior, but that little twerp had just about exhausted Lapis' long-suffering patience.

Then again, did her own equally impotent, passive-agressive snaps mean anything?

Likely not.

Annoying that easily-annoyed homeworld lackey was probably the only impact she could make on the world anymore.

"What do you know about anything, anyways?" she asked, tonelessly, not really putting enough energy in it for it to count as a retort.

"That's enough! I have a serious mission to carry out for my Diamond, and I've had it with everyone underestimating me!" the technician declared in exasperation.

"First Y73, then Jasper, and now you! Everyone talks like this has nothing to do with me.

I don't remember the war. I haven't lived it, I didn't take part in the advances and experiments that took place during it and I most certainly didn't fight. I wasn't made yet. But I remember what followed after. I remember the consequences of the toll that war took on our empire. I know that whatever may have happened during the war, homeworld was never the same after it.

That's why the time after the rebellion, _my_ time, is known as 'Era _II'_."

There was, for a moment, something that Lapis had to knowledge as resembling but could not believe to be a hint of an almost slightly abashed, self-conscious expression mixed in with her anger. Frustrated, she paused her irate gestured to cross her arms, though one wondered in how far that of metal on floaty metal could bring her any satisfaction... could she even feel anything with those artificial parts? And did she just spot Lapis looking at them?

(For a moment, she almost half considered that, in their own ways, the three of them might all have been causalities of that same war, or caught up in its collateral damage at the very least, some more or less directly. None of them wanted to return to that planet; None of them could have existed outside of their respective time periods;

She almost wondered if maybe, just maybe, despite all their apparent differences, they had more in common than any of them would initially have thought.

But she was too bitter, too broken, to wholly overtaken with her own suffering for that thought to take root.)

"Why am I even putting op with this? You're supposed to be assigned to _my_ mission! I order you to shut up!" She demanded, seeming rather childish and ridiculous, contrary to whatever ambitions of being taken seriously she might have had;

Though she was right in principle: They both had no choice but to take it from the warrior, but between the two of them, which of the two of them was _really_ fair game here?

"And now that we're at it, get yourself in there!"

While they had been talking, it must have escaped the younger gem's notice that they had long since reached the prison complex and, indeed, found themselves in the farther edges thereof, in the last segment of the end of a very long corridor lined with holding cells.

With the outside world brought back to her attention, the green gem now pointed at the last holding cell at the very end of the corridor, signaling that Lapis was to get in there and let herself be contained.

"Gon on! I've got a ship to pilot. For your own sake, I suggest that you do not cause any more trouble for us."

Too apathetic to even mouth a 'whatever' at her captor, Lapis stepped over the cell's threshold, not even flinching as the forcefield activated right in front of it – She almost welcomed it, if it meant being away from both of her captors.

And indeed, mercifully, the Peridot turned and hurried to the bridge, a certain irkedness apparent in the metallic sounds of her steps.

Left to her own devices, Lapis had run out o reasons not to let herself slump down into a pile on the floor and to hug her knees to her body, and there she remained, on the very spot she's stood when the forcefield had closed before her, like a thing that had been dumped until its owners had need of it again.

Oh, she knew she was lost, and that any will she could possibly have left in her would be of no consequence, so she did what she'd been doing for the last few thousand years: She went on vegetating rather than living.

Any misguided hope or idea that she could be free had been but a distant dream she had finally woken up from and found herself in the same reality that had inhabited for the past few millenia.

She didn't stir, she didn't make a sound, she most certainly didn't summon her weapon – All the things she'd wished she'd had when she was in the mirror, her arms, her voice, the full extent of her powers... as it would turn out, they had been completely useless to her, and even though she had them, right here, ready to move at a thought, she wouldn't dare to make use of them, nor of the thoughts and feelings she'd clung to for so long; Even the imagination she had escaped to was only a source of new, painful mirages like the one that led her here in the first place, so she just tried her best to stay still and do absolutely nothing as she moved through time.

If she could, she would have resisted even that – when the future could bring nothing good, one tried one's best to delay its arrival.

She only registered distantly when the ship set itself in motion; In the strips of window she could glimpse from her cell, the silvery dots of the starry sky turned to lines as they surpassed light velocity.

It should be apparent that she wasn't given the chance to look outside and watch as her homeland faded into the distance, becoming smaller and smaller until even its star was lost among the multitudes.

Half-consciously, she found one of her hands trailing the smooth skin that had reasserted itself on the parts of her face where the merciless quartz had torn it off, like the violent deed hadn't even been real; But the brutal demonstration of her own powerlessness had left her very far from unscathed.

The motion of the ship made it undeniable: She was being taken back to Earth, and there was nothing she could do.

There was nothing she could do about anything, ever, so what purpose other than suffering did her thoughts, feelings and wants even serve?

Why even bother to find the energy to sustain them any longer?

With her spirit completely broken, her strength depleted and all feeling drained from her features, Lapis Lazuli found that she didn't much care about anything, anymore.

In that moment, she thought she'd lost everything, that she'd hit rock bottom once and or all.

Little did she know that she was just about to lose a whole lot more.

* * *

 _Broken lines, across my mirror  
Show my face, all red and bruised  
And though I screamed and I screamed, well, no one came running  
No I wasn't saved, I wasn't safe from you_

Don't let the water drag you down (Don't let the water drag you down)  
Don't let the water drag you down

Don't let me drown, don't let me drown in the waves, oh  
I could be found, I could be what you had saved

Lay my head, under the water  
Aloud I pray, for calmer seas  
And when I wake from this dream, with chains all around me  
No, I've never been, I've never been free


	9. IX (The Malediction)

_XI._

 _~ Eenie meenie miney moe,_

 _catch your lady by the toes_

 _If she screams, don't let her go_

 _Eeenie meenie miney moe,_

 _Your mother said to pick the very best girl,_

 _And I am~_

 _~For the life that I take, I'm going to hell!  
For the laws that I break, I'm going to hell!  
For the love that I hate, I'm going to hell!  
For the lies that I make, I'm going to hell!_

 _For the way I condescend and never lend a hand.  
My arrogance is making this head buried in the sand.  
For the souls I forsake, I'm going to hell!~_

Through the little sideways snippet of the corridor's windows that Lapis could glimpse from inside her cell, she could see the blurred smears of galaxies as the gem warship sped past them.

From what she'd been told, the distance that took weeks of spaceflight to cover when she came her for her initial, fateful visit, and months for Lapis to cover on her own would be bridged within just a few cycles, thanks to the empire's fearsome new technological advances...

And then she'd have to face them again, the rebels, the lost, abandoned colony that held her prisoner, and, possibly, Steven, the one who let her go.

She'd be coming back as his enemy, or at least a harbinger of bad news; She hope that he'd have the sense to escape or surrender, and, last but not least, that she would escape the shame of having to face him like this.

Of course, he was just one person she'd only met once, but among all the sentient beings she'd encountered, he was about the last one where it mattered the slightest bit, one of the last few innocent memories that had yet to be tarnished, so she hoped that he'd be spared her sorry sight.

She could barely stand it herself, these days.

Even barer than her previous ones, this cell merely contained just about enough space to contain even some of the larger non-fusion gems, but that's about it. It was just one of many identical prison cells and its design was completely utilitarian with absolutely nothing resembling amenities, just a simple rectangle of floor and a forcefield because nothing else is needed, and all that is needed of it is to contain her until something or someone else had need of her, and it does not take very much effort for a gem to stay alive, and she'd survived far longer with far less.

Were she one of the organics, she'd have to keep inserting metabolic fuel into her system and attend to various other maintenance tasks that she'd require further facilities for, needs that the corresponding base instincts would have eventually driven her to attend to despite her stubborn refusal to move from this spot, but as it stood, she'd had no reasons to budge from the spot where the technician had left her an indeterminate amount of time ago, motionless apart from the occasional tilting of her head to either try to sneak a glance at the windows or let it hang again, at times resting her forehead on the arms that were still pulling her knees closely.

Being dragged back here, locked away again should have been the funeral to all her hopes and dreams, and the ending to her story, but yet, Lapis still existed, and her mind wouldn't stop reacting to things or processing them simply because she'd given up.

Time still tricked forward, no curtain fell, and her suffering and indignation did not care one bit that she had accepted them; they still existed.

No matter how hard she had tried not to want or expect anything, the disappointment was still there, and along with it, there was something else slowly creeping in, a certain sadness and loneliness, a kind of subtle regret that her needs were not taken care of, and that she would betray her own heart, the one thing that had never forsaken her in her long solitary confinement – Didn't she use to be somebody? Was she not a creature with feelings and a name? Had she not once declared that she would endure this torment no longer, and if she had gone back on that, what, if anything, was keeping her from renouncing her very name?

Maybe she would, if they made her – whatever had made her think that she had any dignity left? Anything resembling that should have been expunged a long, long time ago, one ought to think, but that was not how it worked.

She should not have been able to take any more, yet here she was, taking it. Taking it lying down.

Being locked up on her own, with nothing to experience and no chance to do anything should have been the return of a recurring nightmare, but at this point, it was almost a respite, if only because the bar had been set insultingly low by all previous events; For one thing, she had all of her senses about her this time, even if there wasn't much to see or hear, and being on her own was still preferable to having to put up with the technician, and _especially_ the warrior.

By the stars, there could be nothing worse than having to be around _her._

For many nights, her physical form was nothing but a vaguely humanoid cauldron wherein undying embers of unbidden feelings stewed and fermented, turning sour, increasing in bitterness, spoiling slowly but sourly once and for all like some dark burnt-out residue sticking to the bottom of a pan, or perhaps some more volatile, poisonous witches brew.

During this, Lapis was mostly left to her own devices, she was only here for the sake of their mission after all, she meant nothing to them except as a tool, so there was absolutely no reason for them to interact with her in any further matter until they'd actually be approaching the planet.

For most of the trip, she saw very little of the ship's other occupants apart from the occasional distant sounds;

But when she _did_ hear them treading near the place where she was being held, the noises they produced proved fairly distinctive, enough to allow to draw some conclusions and to force Lapis to acknowledge their existence.

While she was rotting away in this cell, the technician and the warrior were presumably going about their day as they pleased, freely moving around the ship, making noises, touching things, tangibly existing in a way beyond the bare minimum, like everyone else who wasn't a prisoner, and the mere apparent nature of that fact seemed like a bitter, spiteful taunt to the incarcerated ocean gem, nothing but salt being rubbed into wounds both old and new.

She didn't want to hear or know anything about them, but it was almost impossible not to identify them in detail – the technician's steps were quite distinguishable from the distinct clank of metal on metal courtesy of her artificial parts, and one could figure that the trio's silent voyage came with duties for her to attend to, such as seeing to the maintenance of the ship, assuring the functionality of all systems and any equipment they had brought with them, and likely spending most of her time on the command bridge, assuring that she ship stayed on course.

Presumably, this at least gave her some undeniable reasons to be mousing around the ship and be doing something causing noises; Sometimes she'd be recording one of her logs, or be muttering something to herself that Lapis couldn't make out from the distance, or, the hum of her personal tractor beam would imply that she was carrying some tools or further equipment with her – there was even a certain habituality to her rounds around the ship; If Lapis had cared, she might even have used her walks to and from the bridge to tell the time, as she had to walk past the junction that led to the prison complex to get there.

The warrior was a different, far less predictable story: For this part of the journey, she probably hadn't been given any other orders than to stay put in whatever quarters she had been assigned and to ensure that she'd be in ideal condition for battle by the time they arrived, but since she was the single highest ranking gem on this ship (not counting disgraced prisoners), there was no one here that she'd have been expected to report to, and most certainly no one who could tell her no, or keep her from roaming around the ship as she damn-well pleased; For the most part, she kept to herself and revealed a rather standoffish and aloof nature, more so than one would expect of a military gem (as they were often deployed in groups) and especially such a loud, brash and externalizing one, though there was no telling when or where she would show up, right up until the moment when her thundering steps announced her incoming presence, which she knew to make not just heard, but _felt._

A few times, Lapis thought to have heard her argue with her lime-green subordinate or just generally ordering her around, but for the most part, it seemed like the ship's other occupants didn't see that much more of each other than she saw of them, and why would they? Theirs, too, was a purely professional association, and the blue gem suspected that even her fellow homeworld gems couldn't stand having to be around the uncouth, abrasive and headstrong warrior; It was hard to imagine how _anyone_ would want to stay in her presence longer than they could help, her personality was about as hard to withstand than her fists – No wonder that she loved herself a worthy opponent, those were probably the only ones who could take her without breaking.

For the most part there was just the looming threat that she was lumbering about the ship somewhere and liable to show up to unnerve anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path for kicks and giggles; as for what she did outside of that, nobody knew or even _wanted_ to know – She might have gotten up to some light training, though this ship didn't really seem like it had the facilities for her to do more than pushups or something; Perhaps, she had preparations of her own to attend to, or maybe she just sat somewhere, waiting for orders or rather the opportunity to fulfill them, unless some whim led her elsewhere.

Whenever her heavy footfalls strayed anywhere near the section where Lapis was being held, the blue gem would find herself hugging her knees even closer, hyper-conscious of every tiny sound around her, hoping that nothing would happen to bring her existence to the soldier gem's attention, praying that the sounds of her heavy boots would just _pass_ and carry her somewhere else.

Despite her general apathy, Lapis Lazuli found herself exhaling in a cold-comfort sort of relief every time the warrior's steps trailed away in the distance.

Her one mistake, you see, was to assume that she'd hear her coming.

Certainly, the warrior liked to make herself noticed and had the means to do so, but there was something very deliberate about that as means to prove and ascertain her strength and worthiness, and there was a logical conclusion that should have been obvious from the brazen display of violent strength that had taken place in the interrogation room – as the one the deed had been perpetrated upon, Lapid had perhaps been too close to its episode, to startled from the sheer demonstration, to consider its implications – foremost, the quartz had demonstrated that she could easily poof her captive and was ready to inflict as much pain upon her as it took to make her comply, but at the same time, she'd desisted from destroying her form simply because an informant tended to be more useful with the ability to speak, and because she'd figured that the warning shot would be enough and in its own way, more intimidating as it refrained from implying that the sanctions she could expect that would have a limit.

Just with the dent she'd made in the floor from what had still been a deliberate, calculated release of her power and wrath, it had been made very clear that she could easily smash up half this ship if she were to go all-out, and by implication, her thunderous, forceful sauntering looked more deliberate than just merely careless, certainly deliberation chosen by the discernment of someone who'd chose to flaunt her progress and throw restraint out of the window if slighted, but deliberation nonetheless;

There was no promise anywhere in there that she couldn't be quieter if she so wished, that she couldn't just be there, by the corridor-windows, just as Lapis' eyes had lazily trailed away from the walls of her cell, not prancing around, not threatening, just... _existing_ there in complete silence.

The last time Lapis had looked over there, she hadn't been there; Now she _was_ , the hulking, solitary juggernaut in all her splendor, massive mountain of dark crimson and vibrant tangerine flesh.

The blue gem froze at the sight, and it was pure coincidence that her fright was the kind that rendered her speechless instead of being the sort to make her betray herself with a sudden gasp, but before she reacted as if she had been sought out, she managed to process the perception that the Quartz was making no move toward her –

It occurred to Lapis then, that her cell was one of many in a fairly remote part of the ship, where no one would go unless they had very specific business to carry out, and that the warrior may not have cared to ask her subordinate where exactly she was being held.

She should have sensed her presence, but then again, Lapis should have sensed hers, and she had made an effort to be still. She was still a fair bit away, by the windows at the next junction, and may not have realized that a nearby holding cell had its forcefield active.

In other words, the veteran gem may have been unaware that anyone else was here, and may simply come here to seclude herself where the technician was unlikely to disturb her; Everything about her suggested that she was, for the lack of a better term, on standby, as simple logic would suggest _everyone_ had to be, once in a while, but it didn't make the concept any less bizarre, it was a strange visual that refused to fit with all previous concepts she'd had of the warrior, but was in itself insufficient to lead to any new or further conclusions.

She was sitting on a windowsill, by one of the large windows that lined some of the corridors, wrapped in what Lapis first took for a longer, redder cape but, upon a closer look, revealed itself as a simple field blanket, which she'd wrapped around her back in such a manner that much of her voluminous white hair was trapped underneath it, with bits of her mane hanging out or slightly over its seam at the edges, and some of the fabric hanging off the ledge she was resting on like a sort of crimson tapestry.

It wasn't the only item she'd brought with her: Though it was harder to make out from afar, she was holding a silvery two-pronged material weapon, not her destabilizer – which she might or might not still have been carrying underneath her cloak – but a kind of short, U-shaped bident with a clearly defined cylindrical handle; Even if the rhombic little emblem just above its hilt didn't sport the old Diamond Authority symbol, Lapis would have been able to recognize it as something that was more likely to be a memento or a trophy than something she still actively used, for it wasn't all too different from some of the material weapons that were handed out to new soldiers whose own summoned weapons weren't already hand-held offensive devices, in her own days, its design somewhat lighter and sleeker and thus perhaps only a few generations of design newer than the last ones she remembered seeing.

Besides the old emblem, the simplicity of its design suggested that the large warrior must have come to own it long before she attained her current level of status and fame, or perhaps it had become important to her precisely because she'd used it in a fight that paved her way to glory and fame; Despite its age, it was relatively well-kept condition and polished to shine, and there was something in the way her large fingers trailed the symbol almost tenderly that raised the question of whether she was reliving one of her old victories, perhaps in anticipation of the opportunity to rend flesh and break stone once again.

But if that were so, than why was she not smirking, why was she not looking down, as if she wanted to keep that small gesture at the edge of consciousness, instead directing her stare past the windowpane with a disgruntled, malcontent expression straining her profile, full lips exposing grit teeth, yellow eyes narrowed coldly in displeasure, strong jaws tensed, marked dark brows arched by subliminal wrath, striking features contrasting with the flatness of the area that housed her gem. As a stand-in for a nose, it seemed almost too small for her face, an artless triangular thing that matched the being it housed the most in its sharp edges, a face promising to cut anyone who would dare caress it, the nectarine stripes across it a clear uncompromising warning, like camouflage, or war-paint, or the bright, shrill colors of a poisonous amphibian.

And yet even like this, everything from the heels of her feet to the crown of her head boasted of a maddening, insulting degree of perfection, so superior as to seem artificial.

There was a certain delay to processing the situation, simply because it was quite a leap to consider it, that a terrifying being such as her was even capable of such a thing: She was _brooding_ , stewing with a certain subliminal restlessness and discomfort.

If it were anyone else, such a sight might have invited worry or compassion, but with her, it just heightened her sense of menace, meaning just lowered thresholds for the raw wrath and power constrained in her form to be released and vented at the next object or person unfortunate enough to catch her attention.

Now more than ever, the ancient veteran was the sight that would compel every instinct in one's body to _stay away,_ and assure anyone unlucky enough to stumble onto this scene by accident that they were _not_ supposed to see this.

She wouldn't have left anyone near her, and anyone foolish enough to try would be offering themselves to her teeth and claws like some bizarre sacrifice to satisfy some kind of island volcano goddess –

Her majesty the ice queen was raging, uncontainable force of nature, and woe those who dare cross the path of her rage.

But did massive power alone impart invulnerability?

Lapis of all gems should know better, but the last thing she wanted was to see that, to see her at all, but mostly to see her _like this_.

And yet the blue gem kept looking, her mind too blank to speculate about the endless tree-branches of possible reasons; The warrior's very presence demanded attention, as much as she wished she weren't here, as much as she wanted to slip into complete denial of her existence, she remained there, continuing her inconvenient existence, and the unwelcome remainder she constituted –

For it remained that, at its core, anger was a reaction to injustice or insult, a measure to ensure that wrongs were acknowledged and righted; It could certainly overshoot it bounds, spill at targets it didn't belong to, or be sustained by entitlement very far from real wrongs, he who fights monsters must take care that he does not become a monster himself, but, at it's birth of much aggression was always defense;

Therefore, for Lapis Lazuli to give up completely meant to quieten all the rage in her being, all the contempt and resentment rising every time she was slighted, time and time again, even as the surrender meant to ensure her survival increasingly began to feel like destroying herself.

So why then did she have to look upon this tremendous creature that exuded wrath, breathed wrath and defined wrath, who seemed to contain so much wrath that even her massive, hulking body should not have been enough to contain it, so much it should by all means break her apart, even as formidable as she was?

In her presence, it was impossible not to see wrath, think about wrath, experience wrath, acknowledge the existence of wrath and _feel_ wrath, mostly against her, and the horrible unjust world that allowed things like her to exist, and exalted them above so many others, but even that last excuse would get shaky when she just sat there without doing anything to earn further ire, yet still representing a threat by her mere presence, charging the silence with tension by the very act of keeping silence –

And for now, that's how she stayed, by all indications unaware that she was even being observed, waiting for the ship to reach the Crystal Systems so it could turn back around and let her get back to her life and whatever glorious conquests were supposed to be part of it next after this little excursion down memory lane was taken care of.

Threadbare and frayed, Lapis wanted nothing more than for the warrior to disappear again, but, earth was likely still far and she had no reason to make haste, as it seemed, yet unaware of the lone observer she had yet to notice – It would, after all, have been too far-fetched to assume that she knew all along and was counting on this very reaction.

The malice in this could not be put past her, but her actions themselves did not speak of deliberation as much as they did when she knew she was being seen; There she was, merely killing time with some uncertain preoccupation ghosting around on her mind.

At some point, she let her legs break into a slight sway, a half-hearted variation of her usual impatient gestures, breaking the silence like a strict, hard drumbeat whenever the heels of her heavy boots made contact with the walls.

The presence of sound acted almost like an intro heralding further menace, but any level of pressure that would leave the wall intact was way below anything that would bring someone with her herculean strength any kind of real relief.

She must be living in a world of cardboard, but instead of being all too concerned with the prospect that she might break something, or some _one,_ she lived for the days when she could unleash her monstrous power to the fullest –

Anything less could not hope to satisfy her, nor even keep her attention for long, and it followed that she must not get more satisfaction. She lusted for destruction and itched not just to crush her enemies but to plunge them into despair, but someone she could squash all too easily would not do, or at least it would be little more than an annoying chore, much like this mission.

So it was no wonder that her motions ceased, eventually, just gradually petering out as she seemed to reach a certain state of disgruntled listlessness, and silence reigned again.

The warrior was still present, just... sitting there rather morosely for a long time, waiting as the stars sped past the windowpane.

If anything, her mood seemed to sour more the closer they came to their destination, a tendency that, once considered, could probably be extended to the last few days, superficially, perfectly consistent with how one would expect an important, entitled gem of high rank to react when shipped off to a mission she considered a waste of time –

But what she displayed here,on her own, seemed to go beyond this.

There was no telling what was going on underneath that thick white hair or beyond those large, high-strung yellow eyes, but she seemed almost a little uneasy, though not in a way one would have connected with fear –

The very idea of this hulking savage being capable of such emotions, let alone that anything could make her have need of such expressions seemed patently ridiculous.

Perhaps it was just the contrast of the warrior allowing herself to act more natural on her own – it wasn't like her usual disgusted annoyance ever completely vanished from her face, at least nor for long.

Occasionally, she would fiddle with the old weapon she'd brought, running one large orange finger alongside the curve where the spikes of the bident diverged.

At one point, she brought one hand to her mouth and could briefly be glimpsed biting her nails on her ring and middle fingers, not the kind of private vice one would expected her to have.

Eventually, she ended up leading that same hand to the windowpane, and even had the other one follow it, leaving the old weapon to rest on her lap as her fingertips – large meaty things barely deserving of such a delicate-sounding word – pressed down onto the glass, in the process of turning more completely toward the glass, ignoring the strands of long white hair that pulled free on her cover in the process, looking at the darkness beyond with something that resembled recognition, her eyes softening with what could possibly even have been _sorrow_ or _longing_... except that wasn't possible, was it?

One way or another, the contrast between the tentative gesture and the strong, toned arms it was carried out with was rather surreal, as mismatched as her different-colored hands themselves.

Rather than staring out there into the void like all this time before, it seemed like she had actually spotted something out there that sparked some recognition –

Then, suddenly, something beeped.

"Bridge to Jasper. This is Peridot."

From some unseen communication device, a high voice poured forth. When her call wasn't graced with an immediate response, she requested explicit confirmation.

"Jasper, please respond?"

"What is it?" the warrior replied impatiently, speaking in her usual gruff, harsh voice, immediately back to her usual implacable self.

"We'll be reaching the outer borders of the crystal systems shortly, but it's still a while until we reach the inner planets. Earlier, you said you were planning to question our informant on your own. If you're still planning on that, now would be a good chance to do so."

"Where _is_ that brat, anyway?" the quartz retorted, without a hint of gratitude.

"Hold on a bit – ...She's quite close to your location, actually. Just follow the corridor to your right and you should be there almost immediately."

"Land directly at their base." the veteran ordered, her tone of voice making it clear that she considered this conversation done with.

The next thing that could be heard, before even the static buzz of the intercom fizzling out, was the sound of the warrior's heavy boots connecting with the ground as she let herself slide off the windowsill with one abrupt thud.

Lapis did not see what happened next, for by then, she'd long since buried her face behind the meager citadel that were her arms and knees, hoping to prevent any suspicion that she'd noticed, let alone _been looking_.

But from the shuffle of sounds, she could more or less infer what took place:

The blanket, insofar as it hadn't half slid off of her when she'd jumped to her feet, was just carelessly discarded all around her, and there was a click as she undid the brooch that held her cape in place, which she then proceeded to throw where she had been sitting earlier, with just as little regard.

Only the old weapon received any decree of respectful care, being deposited by the window, where she could easily pick it up upon her return.

Then, she turned around, sharply and with purposeful forcefulness, and it was obvious that she meant business.

Instantaneously, Lapis was absolved of any and all illusions that this could possibly end painlessly. She'd entertained the possibility of course, that maybe, just maybe, the large soldier gem would never notice her presence and would eventually just waltz off to terrorize her subordinate, or think of something else that would alleviate her frustrations, but she never truly believed that she would escape, and now, her fears were confirming themselves.

As the warrior's footfalls closed in on her location, the imminent future had become impossible to deny; The gargantuan soldier drew nearer and nearer, and Lapis didn't need to look up to imagine the way she must be looking down at her, eyes narrowed, chin held high, dismissive scowl or maybe a proud smirk, perhaps a hand on her voluptuous hips;

If she'd caught onto any indications that her prisoner had observed her earlier, she didn't let it show, perhaps simply because that would have entailed admitting to a kind of vulnerability she would not tolerate, perhaps she was instead waiting for a good, unrelated excuse to let her have it, and soundly too.

Alternatively, she might be unaware, and the prospect of having a hapless captive to kick around might finally have provided that boost to her mood she had been looking for, so she might even been bearing that ravenous grin of hers;

Lapis didn't know, nor did she want to know; She didn't want to look at the warrior's face, and if she never saw it again, it would have been too soon, but since when had it ever mattered what she wanted?

The heavy footfalls only stopped for the buzz of the forcefield's dissipation, and resumed right afterward, until a slight dimming in the blaring light beyond her eyelids suggested that Lapis had fallen under the towering warrior's shadow.

The only freedom that could exist in her presence was to preempt her domination:

"What do you want?" Lapis spoke, her voice cold but still neutered of confrontational sharpness.

"Your report." the warrior began directly, in a harsh, demanding tone that dispensed with all pleasantry. "It mentions nothing about the leader of the rebellion."

At the bottom of her field of vision, she could glimpse the warrior's boots, indicating that her towering form stood there in a confident, wide posture, likely looking down at the pathetic little creature that found herself at her mercy.

"What, that fusion...?" the blue gem asked, turning her head to address her captor but not quite raising her head.

From the beginning of an actual conversation and the fact that she was meekly offering her information, Lapis might have been tempted to let herself believe that what she had to fear was an _eventual_ threat she had to scramble to postpone and placate; Maybe that's what she'd wanted to believe, despite her earlier assessment of the warrior's volatile, unpredictable nature; Or perhaps it was the veteran's own steady, confident tone that suggested that she didn't think any further measures were necessary after her earlier display had rendered her prisoner sufficiently docile.

But no considerations seemed to have entered her mind when she suddenly struck the smaller gem with a forceful kick, forcefully enough to slam her back against the wall of the cell, which, all things considered, had been a very short distance, but the position she found herself in was what made all the difference: Curled into a ball, it had been easier to block out the world and steady herself, but sprawled against the wall, Lapis couldn't move her limbs fast enough to protectively cover herself, and she felt utterly exposed., especially as she'd reflexively used one hand to stabilize her position – and what more, with the back of her head against the wall, she had no choice but to look at the warrior, and once she'd looked at her, she couldn't look away.

Somewhat bowed down to look at Lapis, the soldier's form was like a large, enveloping canopy closing all around her, filling her field of vision everywhere she looked, and in the shadow cast by her hair and posture, her yellow eyes gleamed straight at her prisoner.

Rather than anything else that the blue gem had imagined to ind there, the Jasper's face was consumed with an expression of _indignation_ , like she was deathly insulted by some unspeakable mockery directed at her.

"I don't want to _hear_ **anything** about that damned fusion!" To demonstrate her displeasure, she struck the wall above Lapis with a resounding, powerful blow, yet the mere fact that the wall remained intact identified it as a warning blow, though the sound and force alone were dizzying.

But before the blue gem could recover from that sight alone, a thick, powerful red hand had seized her by one of the straps that held her top attached to her chest, and hoisted into the air at an unbelievable speed.

One moment, she was struggling to keep herself sitting upright by leaning against the wall, and in the next, she could only process the intrusion of a warm, thick hand against the soft skin that was typically covered by her clothing, the straps of her clothing digging into her skin and neck, and the utterly helpless sensation of her slender feet dangling in the air.

The quartz' hands were solid, merciless things, but not as coarse or calloused as Lapis would have expected them to be; Then again, callouses would have meant that her environments had been able to make an impact on her, and if anything, her environment should be getting callouses from _her._

Everything about her, from the tips to the toes to the crown on her head, was nothing if not utterly unyielding.

Even to another gem, this Jasper's hands felt like those of a polished statue, a hard, firm thing that didn't recede, albeit moving, shifting, _living_ , every bit as alive as Lapis herself, if not more so, as she was the one hanging there limply while this thing stood there, her harsh voice booming with feral rage:

"I asked about _their_ _ **Leader.**_ Tell me about Rose Quartz!" she demanded, punctuating the words at the end of each sentence by giving her captive a good, ruthless shake.

And though the strap of fabric digging into her neck could not have killed or seriously inconvenienced Lapis, together with the complete helplessness inherent in the situation, the discomfort was enough to blank out her mind; Otherwise, she might have wondered about the sudden change from the warrior's earlier blasé attitude and indifference toward the mission to the sheer need behind these insistent demands, the way she seemed so disproportionally and most of all _personally_ offended at the wrong 'leader' being named like she had been made the subject of some cruel mockery, or her lack of caring if her prisoner could even reasonably provide the answers she sought – She just seemed insistent to shake her until she broke or the answers tumbled out, whichever came first.

The blue gem did not see any inconsistency at all, given that she could only perceive her adversary as this roaring, violent _thing_ , and this as an endless repeat of the many fruitless interrogations that had been poured upon her, the entirety of her life long-since transformed into a broken record.

By the rules of her own little hell, all of this made perfect sense; It was a game she knew well, and had no choice but to play even though she knew she could never win:

"I don't know anything... about that..." her voice clearly strained, the struggled to push the words past her constrained throat.

What had ever made her believe that having a voice to speak with would have ever made a difference?

It was all the same, she was trapped wherever she went, and yet, here she was, struggling to see another day of being used, betrayed and mistreated.

"Don't screw with me, brat!" the warrior spat, her cold and merciless tone dripping with poison. "Don't even begin to think you are capable of that!"

With another sudden, violent motion, Lapis found herself harshly pinned against the wall, the warrior's large hand constricting her chest, and pushing her hard into the wall to punctuate her words.

"Didn't they keep you trapped? Don't you understand who there traitors **are,** what they **did** , what their thoughtless scheming cost all of us?"

Breathless against the wall, Lapis didn't even have the capacity to consider her words; It was a struggle to just _exist._ Did she feel anger toward the rebels for failing to release her, and causing the war that led to her imprisonment in the first place?

Yes, yes of course, by the Diamonds, she did!

But what good would it do to go back to them, to that godforsaken planet? Would that give her back any of the time she lost, or turn her back into the person she'd been before?

It was all no good, and Lapis was just tired.

Why couldn't they all just _leave her alone?_

She'd never asked to be involved in this conflict to begin with, she'd never asked to get mixed up in this fight; All she'd ever wanted was to live in peace, but with that option forever closed off to her, what did she have left but her rage?

"You act all pathetic, " the warrior spat, as if she couldn't help but to take every fiber of Lapis' existence as a grave insult. "...but you used to be an aristocrat, didn't you? A _Lapis Lazuli_ , at that. You're actually quite powerful, aren't you?"

That one question alone summoned an urgent, screaming emptiness into her mind.

It was something she had never considered and therefore didn't have an answer to.

After a lifetime of being pushed around, trapped and forced against her will, she would never, not in thousands of years, consider herself as remotely 'powerful'.

It was just like this warrior to see everything in terms of _fighting_ and potential uses in _battle,_ except, how had she escape, if not by fighting off her captors on Earth?

She had been desperate and, in self-defense, fallen back on her instincts fueled by the heat of her frenzied emotions, not thinking any further than how much she wanted to flee from the traitors and how badly she wanted anything but to be trapped again, that she hadn't wasted half a thought on the world and the rebels that had done this to her – She didn't consider that she could actually have caused real damage until Steven brought that to her attention, asking her not to harm him and explaining how the people of his world actually needed all that water;

She hadn't known, she'd never meant any harm, most of all, she had been desperate and in pain, struggling to function with that crack, and she never wanted anything other than to go home and live in peace, but, by the Diamonds, she could not deny that she had power, and she could not deny that she'd felt _rage_ ;

But what good had that ever done her?

What good was that power to her, who never wanted to fight?

Her strength had never been meant for battle, never been _her own_ to begin with, but something to be used in the service of others, at best burden causing others to react with fear, envy and precaution when she'd one nothing but to be herself, and at worst a bait that marked her as a prize for others to exploit. It had never been something she _owned,_ and yet, others treated her as if it was, while at the same time looking to use it for their own end, and she was beginning to think that this warrior was going to become the next in a long, long line of gems who had done just that.

The veteran's question had been a clear taunt, almost teasing, before her demeanor hardened again. There was rage, and there was disgust, yes, but mixed in with that was the increasing presence of _frantic incomprehension_.

"You have such power, and yet you sit idle? You can't possibly be serious! How can you just sit there in silence let them get away with _what they did_ just because you're too much of a _coward_ to face then?" the striped gem raged in complete disgust. "I can't _believe_ the sight of you! You're a disgrace to the homeworld, that's what you are!"

Still pressing her to the wall, her single, left hand large enough to pin her down close to choking her, the warrior raised her right and gave her prisoner what, by her standards, must have been a resounding but slight smack mainly intended to humiliate, but enough to cause visible scrapes on Lapis' face and cause a dreadful ringing in her ear.

"You spineless wench would do anything just to preserve your wretched little existence, wouldn't you? The reports said that you've even let yourself be healed by one of those pitiful organic creatures.

Have you no honor? No self-respect?

If it were me, I would have faced a warrior's death like a proper gem rather than let myself sink so low!" This, of course, she said in the confidence that she would never get captured in the first place; It was easy for her to say such a thing after she'd emerged from that hellhole of a war as a decorated hero, and not at all hard to give them her earlier dramatic spiel about 'not being taken alive' when she had survived where many did not – and who could say that she even meant those words, and wouldn't turn hypocrite to save her hide if it were her wasting away down there, alone on that gem-forsaken rock.

The nerve of her to speak of a 'warrior's death'. Lapis had never been a warrior, and yet, given the choice, she would think such an end preferable to what had followed her capture...

But she'd never had that choice. What if being 'taken alive' was the very thing that happened to you before you even knew what was happening to you? What if you were _already_ lost and disgraced, but still felt feelings, and wanted to live?

What could you do, then?

Whatever the answers were, she would surely not be getting them from this warrior, yet Lapis couldn't take her eyes from the warrior's perfect teeth and full, slightly-protruding lips as they practically spat the words.

"Why don't you fight back?" she demanded to know, sending a further, proper punch toward her prisoner's face, still not breaking her skin. It appeared that she preferred to tenderize her little by little rather than to do to much damage to fast, sending down her concrete block of a fist time and time again. "Come on! Don't act so docile! You must have some of that aristocrat's pride left somewhere! Or are you actually enjoying this? COME AT ME, brat. Why don't you come at me and destroy me?"

Her words frightened the blue gem more than the blows themselves ever could.

She couldn't seriously mean to fight here, in the enclosed quarters of this prison-cell.

Did she want to die?

With her eyes wild, almost bulging, and individual strands of her long, white hair beginning to hang into her face, and the undercurrent of _complete bewilderment_ still apparent, she looked exactly like Lapis felt, however well she hid it beneath her deadened, expressionless face.

The warrior wasn't alone in her disbelief, because Lapis couldn't comprehend it, either.

Not just herself, who had allowed herself to be reduced to such a pitiful state, even though she should by all means have been capable of escaping and had sworn to never be held down again, nor this warrior, who would brazenly announce that she welcomed oblivion;

The question was plain on her face: 'Do you turn your back on everything that reminds you of unpleasant things?' And she could ask right back: 'Do you always charge face-first into the things that you should fear?'

'Why fear?'

'Because fear is the natural response to things that could destroy you.'

'And why should I care if something destroys me?'

It should have been obvious, something that didn't even bear thinking about, but judging by this warrior's words and actions, she didn't even consider this a decent excuse.

Lapis just couldn't comprehend it, and it frightened her to consider that there was somebody who _could._

Perhaps, so Lapis thought, this was the most frightening thing of all, of all the many, many things that made her terrifying.

But a close second was that, even as her hard, hard hand gripped her, enormous enough to squeeze down on both her neck and upper chest, there was still a warmth to her body.

There could be no doubt that the violent savage was not some kind of eldritch demon but a gem much like herself, abnormally powerful, yes, but just another gem nonetheless, a single, living being exerting all that malignant power.

Why did she have to be warm? Why did she have to be so undoubtedly alive? Why did she have to have clear, discernible emotion quaking in her voice even as she continued her relentless assault?

Why did she have to force her to acknowledge her presence with everything she did, her grip, her blows, the occasional stray strand of white hair brushing her skin?

Why did she have to exist and act exactly like the part of herself that Lapis _hated?_

The warrior peeled her from the wall, only to slam her into it all over again.

"How can you just let them get away this? How can you just stay silent like this? You're not like that ignorant midget, you've _seen_ the war. You've seen what Earth and Homeworld were like _before_ those traitors ruined everything, shouldn't you hate them most of all? How can you care so little!"

Should she?

Lapis didn't know.

It all seemed to clear when she broke free from the mirror. Would she have said that she hated the rebels? She'd certainly been furious at them, but why did it matter now?

Disgusted, the warrior let out a deliberately loud sigh and ceased with her punches, perhaps deeming the prisoner's bruised face sufficiently tenderized, her will sufficiently broken.

This time, it was chiefly the left half of her face that was covered in marks, not as severely as before as this had been a significantly more methodical measure despite the genuine revulsion that gave it its edge.

Perhaps she had concluding that continuing this beat down would not bring her the satisfaction she longed for.

She might have had limited regards for this mission and the necessary assets remaining intact, but the part of it that involved Lapis _talking_ and being able to do so was the one part that interested her. Even with her dominant hand otherwise occupied, and her rage overflowing, she was pragmatic and systematic at delivering a breaking of the body and mind.

One again, her suffering was prolonged because someone thought her useful, and she should be furious at this indignity, but, if she hadn't fought tooth and claw, didn't she agree to this? Wasn't she complicit? Did she not deserve this?

Why was she even here, taking this pointless harangue of abuse without lifting a finger?

Her fingers.

In that moment, Lapis suddenly found herself aware of her hands and legs that were still dangling down, not even held down or constricted because her tormentor had considered her just that inconsequential.

Had she thought this over and made an actual conscious decision, she would probably have decided against her next action, but that was not what happened next.

Somehow, her little blue fingers found her way onto the warrior's large hand, tiny, inconsequential things barely matching the size of a single of her fingers, and nonetheless trying to ease the pressure on her neck.

"You little...!" Recognizing the small gesture of disobedience exactly for what it was, the warrior readied her first again to squash the last of her existence, but unable to bear the the thought that she'd be someone else's personal punching bag once again, the blue gem reacted on instinct.

It was not the sort of dignified, rational act that would have involved any sort of goal-directed planning; It was simply a caged animal lashing out, an automatic, primal reaction triggered by one indignity too many. She had clenched her teeth and taken so many of these punches, and simply couldn't bring herself to suffer another one, couldn't get her heart to shut up no matter how much she wanted to.

In one moment, her small hangs clawed down, her bare feet reached for the cold metal of the wall.

She may have been small and light, but that was precisely what allowed her to swing herself forward, pushing herself off the wall and using the very same grip the warrior had on her; It made hanging down like this just that much more unpleasant, but in that instant, Lapis didn't care – she was lost anyways – She just wanted to put one single mark on that warrior's precious perfect face, and, despite the haphazard execution, her knees rammed straight into the warrior's face, not in the least because the blue gem has summoned her wings in mid swing to assist her charge; As she swung back, she used her momentum and the force from her wings to pull free of the soldier's grasp, dispelling her wings as she'd managed to steady herself against the wall, glancing up to relish the sight that she had craved since she'd first laid eyes on the soldier gem

But what awaited her was yet another disappointment.

For one thing, the seasoned fighter had noticed almost immediately what Lapis had decided to do, and decided to take it on purpose, without resistance, perhaps for effect, but it seems like the wild, instinctual nature of the act still caused her to flinch and raise her other hand without her intention, though it was, at this point, too late to block the strike.

It was surprising that she still had that instinct, even though it must have been clear to her that she'd barely feel the blow, perhaps some last vestige of proof that she was indeed a living gem and not an automaton.

Even then, the message was clear:

There was not a scratch on her face, not the slightest, tiniest bruise, and by the time Lapis came to look at her, her expression was rather unfazed, at most, somewhat annoyed.

Instead, it was Lapis' knees that ached pointedly as the adrenaline was beginning to give way to shock, her nails hurt from her attempt to dig them into her large opponent's skin – with her desperate charge, she's effectively hurt herself more than her target.

Even so, the altercation, barely deserving of the term 'battle', may not have been anywhere near decided if both participants had been used to warfare; The blue gem had her weapon out, her opponent had nowhere to escape to, and as obscene as her strength may have been, Lapis herself possessed the raw power to match if not surpass her –

But as it stood, only one of them had spent all her life honing her instincts for battle, and her reaction was swift and merciless.

Before Lapis knew it, she had been pinned down on to the ground with a hard, unforgiving thud, hands held in place behind her back by one of the warrior's mighty hands, whereas the fingers of the other rested at the outline of her gem, where its edges met her skin, ready to tear it out, or worse.

Lower on her back, about where her waist was, she was being kept in place by one of the warrior's knees, while another kept her feet restrained, though the warrior was not so much kneeling on top of her as squatting right beside her, letting some of her great weight rest upon her, just enough to cause a painful level of strain, but not so much as to make upholding her form a challenge – though that was a very temporary state.

"Dispel your weapon, brat!" the warrior commanded, exerting a little bit more pressure just to prove that she meant business.

Still reeling from the hard impact of her face against the floor, Lapis could barely bring herself to react by the time she felt the warrior's nails digging in where her gem connected with her skin. "Your weapon. _**Now**_ _._ " And instead of pulling, she squeezed, digging in her nails around the core of her very being.

Between Lapis' gem and the last vestiges of her fighting spirit, it was the latter that cracked first, and without her will to hold it up, the water came down all around her in heavy drops, merely an extension of the hot tears of impotent rage that spilled onto her face, being released in tandem with one long, last scream of utter desperation.

Within seconds, Lapis' once apathetic face had transformed into a raw, ugly mess of tears and snot, as helpless as a human child for all the cursed power she had never asked for, her slender, delicate form racked with six-thousand years' worth of sobs and tremors, coming apart under the warrior's adamant choke hold, like everything she was, everything she'd ever treasured or valued was just disintegrating in the Jasper's grip, dissolving in _her,_ her unforgiving presence the only thing she could feel or register anymore.

Not even her despair was left to her anymore: She wanted to weep and whimper until her throat was raw from crying and all moisture had been quelled from her form, but the warrior, as usual, could not be ignored; Even a small shifting of her weight, a minute difference in her posture, was enough to demand all her attention, the very same selfish survival drive that she'd mocked her for, forcing her to turn around and present her messy, tear-stained, anger-twisted face to her, glaring at her in pained, desperate resentment.

The warrior eyed her as a hunter might upon finding a meager, disappointing catch of prey in one of her traps, scrutinizing and cold, until her face split into the thinnest, coldest, most poisonous of all smiles, and Lapis was forced to watch her looming form close in on her as she leaned down, her silver hair falling all around the blue gem as her tormentor drew uncomfortably close, so close she could _smell_ her, couldn't help but take in the scent of earth, dust and iron, the devil-smirk and ravenous yellow eyes, the gem in her face glittering closely, so close above her face yet so far beyond her reach, such a pitiful little thing that would have felt small in her palm, and if only she could destroy it, this foul beast would cease to exist... oh, how much she longed to spit upon it! What would she give, to have this vile, disgusting creature at _her_ mercy for once!

"Well, are you enjoying yourself _now_?" the warrior taunted, her rough, low voice mocking her with slow, almost sensuous relish, smirking spitefully as she lowered herself just a little further onto her prisoner, letting out a low, derisive chuckle as the delicate gem squirmed and strained underneath her, unable to keep the soft, pained sounds from forcing their way past her teeth. "Hahaha, looks like you had a bit of a spine in you after all!"

If Lapis had had something like a human spine, she was sure it would be broken by now. The warrior had gleefully pushed her to the brink of what her form was capable of withstanding, and making her wish she would just go on and crush her already.

The ocean gem could take no more of this – to be near this warrior was to be crushed by the mass of an entire world, physically and figuratively.

And indeed, she would not rescind this hyperbole even after she'd gone on to get a taste of what that actually felt like, the latter experience just a fuller, physical manifestation of the metaphysical experience that permeated this instant.

But right now, it was still her turn to get used some more, once her tormentor had her fill of spiting her, and after an endless, crushing moment that was nothing but tears and water against the smooth surface of the floor plating, the warrior eased up on the pressure, just enough to allow her to produce coherent speech.

"Listen, brat. If you think that because you don't care about anything other than yourself, you have nothing left to lose, you are very, very wrong, and very, very arrogant, and very ignorant. If you don't give us what we want, we have ways of making you feel much, much more pain, understood?"

In a quick motion, she let her left hand slide from Lapis' gem to her shoulder, lifting her up a little bit just to slam her face back onto the ground.

"I don't have to shatter you for that – I don't even have to crush your form. This could go on for as long as you want to. "

If there was one gem who looked like she knew about 200 different ways to make someone scream, it _would_ be this warrior.

Even now, the blue gem wanted to scream again, but rather than let the warrior have that pleasure, she's rather bite her own tongue and muffle the cries that accompanied the new wave of tears which she failed to hold back.

"And even if your lacking loyalty does not compel you to answer my questions,", her tormentor continued, dismissively, "I can promise you that _I_ will. So tell me, once an for all: What do you know about _Rose Quartz_?"

"I told you... before... I don't remember... anything... about that..."

The warrior was not impressed, giving her captive's head and shoulders another, somewhat lighter push toward the ground, more of a token to remind her of the last one. "Come on! You know what a rose quartz is, do you?"

"There was... one quartz there, but...",

"But...?! " the warrior repeated, the threat in her voice implicit.

"I think she was an Amethyst..."

"You _think_?"

"Well, I _don't know_ , she was... I think she had some kind of defect-"

"I told you before, don't screw with me!" the warrior bellowed, sounding offended. In an instant, her hand had slid back onto Lapis's gem. "I don't want to hear about any defective runt! I don't want to hear a single pathetic word out of your mouth, unless it's about Rose Quartz! Understood? Understood?"

"...understood..." Lapis conceded, breathlessly. Every word out of her mouth felt like selling a tiny portion of her soul, but what choice did she have anymore? If she'd learned anything about this warrior at all, it was that the leader of the rebellion was a hell of a sore topic.

"There's no way you could confuse her with anyone else if you saw her. A rose quartz, in a long gown, with her gem on her midsection and a large shield with a spiral pattern on it. Healing powers, sometimes organic creatures."

"Healing powers?"

"So what is it? Does that ring a bell after all?"

It did, but, she'll be damned if she ever delivered Steven to that monster's knife. Or whatever else her summoned weapon happened to be.

"No, I was just...surprised, that, that someone like her would have that power..."

That wasn't even a complete lie, so her reaction was still natural, though her little, resigned voice in itself was enough to get on her captor's nerves.

"Are you screwing with me again, brat?"

"No, I... I think I remember... a gem, in a long gown..." she poured forth, her lips the only thing that moved about her limp, subdued form, all tension, force or resistance have scattered away.

The warrior's reaction was the exact opposite; It was a if all the confident zest the interrogation had brought out in her evaporated the instant she heard that her old, old nemesis may still have been alive.

Lapis couldn't possibly guess what was going through her head; She doubted that anybody could.

Her eyes went so, so wide, and yet they remained unfocussed, as if whisked away to a different time by an old, familiar, recurring melody.

She though she actually saw the warrior's face _blanching_ , the usually vibrant coloration of her face losing some of its lustrous saturation, and most certainly felt the grip on her wrists tightening manifold, beginning slowly but then increasing exponentially, ceasing it's increase only for the hand that held down her back at her gem to fly to the ground, next to her face, like the quartz actually had trouble keeping her balance for a moment.

The look on her face was unreal in its rawness; For a moment, it seemed like either her eyes or her gem might pop straight out of her face.

Then, she seemed to remember Lapis' existence, and used the hand that was conveniently parked next to her head to seize her by the hair and demand further answers.

"Spit it out, BRAT!"

The warrior was a mess, her breathing audible, her voice and eyes frenetic, like she perhaps a glimpse of the younger, who had fought in the Earth war.

So far, her tall tales had led Lapis to picture her self from back then not much unlike her current self, perhaps full of cocky youthful vigor rather than grizzled experience and mastery, or maybe seasoned even then, by all means a rugged, equal contemporary and worthy opponent to the mighty Rose Quartz – but this reaction just now, was something she knew well enough to recognize it as the feeling of an old, long-buried nightmare coming back to life...

But she was in no position to spend time on deducing what that possibly meant; All she knew was that she was at the total mercy of a complete madperson and had to find a way to placate her, lest she find her end as her personal stress ball.

"I only saw her a few times... mostly from afar, but, I think I used to hear her voice... lots of times..."

"Then she is still alive?" the warrior concluded, cutting her off. As her speech went on, her sense of shock and disbelief seemed to be gradually replaced by tremors of violent rage. "After all she did... all the destruction she caused... all the sacrifices made to stop her, everything that was lost... and you're telling me that for the last five thousand years, she's lived to tell the tale? You mean to tell me that all this time, she's been _**frolicking across the meadows**_ on that _miserable_ garbage rock of hers, resting on her laurels while all of us paid the price of her transgressions, all for _nothing_?"

She let go of Lapis' hair to land a good, solid punch on the ground next to her, resounding enough but still restrained by her standards, the huge, bulging muscles of her arm quaking and itching for something, _anything_ that they were allowed to punch _for real._

Preferably Rose Quartz, one might presume.

"HOW COULD SHE BE ALIVE!" she howled, as if she'd never felt so cheated in her life. "How could this be? How could such a flagrant ridicule of all order be allowed to exist in this universe?!"

"I don't know... if it it was even her..." the blue gem interjected. "...and even if she was, she might not be alive any more... The object I was trapped in was... mostly used by that Pearl... And just, just a short time ago, she... She secluded herself in her quarters, and demanded to be shown pictures of her. ...of... the tall gem in the long, white gown. Just, the same ones, over and over again, for days on end... and I'm not sure... haven't heard her voice ever since.

She wasn't with the group that came after me, when... when I escaped..."

"Then she is shattered? So recently? Could she have slipped through my hands, just as I could have had the chance to _**beat**_ _her into the ground_ at long, long last?"

Just what answer did this veteran want to hear from her?

Did the Jasper even know that answer herself?

"I don't know!" Lapis cried, pathetically, pleading to what she knew to be a heart of steel. "I was trapped the whole time, I was.. shut away for most of it... I could only see what they let me see, I... I have _absolutely no idea_ what happened!"

That, it seems, did seem to get through to her – maybe it was Lapis' emotional, exhausted tone, some desire of her own to be done with this, or the knowledge that they would be arriving on Earth before long, but at this point, the warrior softened her grip, somewhat rose up from her bowed-down position and took one last look at the 'result' of her interrogation.

The first of the bruises she'd inflicted on her unfortunate prisoner were already starting to fade.

After a moment of coldly scrutinizing her handiwork, the warrior simply let go. She didn't even bother with throwing Lapis or slamming her into the wall, content to simply leave her collapsed into a disorderly heap onto the ground, from which she didn't bother to rise up anymore – what was the point?

This cruel world would just find another way to hold her down; Rising up would be just another invitation to be beaten back down.

And how about that? It seemed like the warrior had been right all along:

It looks like neither of them was going to get what she wanted.

Rather than be satisfied with her victim's thorough breaking, her tormentor seemed more exhausted than anything else, letting out one long, loud sigh that was half a complaint, her earlier frevor neatly stuffed back to wherever it had come from.

Once again, the blue gem came in contact with the warrior's boots, but not because she'd use them to strike her, but simply as a means to turn her around and detach her much-abused face from the ground, like she was so low a piece of garbage that she dared not touch her with her hands again.

"Pathetic!" she declared, actually bringing a hand to her temples, rubbing at her weary eyes with her large, red fingers. "As expected, you can't seem to spit out anything useful. What did I even expect!"

Indeed.

What had Lapis even expected, when she departed on this journey?

As she departed, the warrior casually pressed a button to reactivate the forcefield, and walked down the corridor without any further comments, pausing only to retrieve her cape and pull it back over her broad, muscular shoulders, passing by the window to arrange its position based on her faint reflection, even taking a few seconds to adjust her collar and sweep the front bangs of her hair aside.

Only then did she turn back to address the sad, broken being lying in the cell.

"Get yourself ready, brat. I'll be needing you on-site once we've landed."

By now, the ominous blue globe of the Earth could be seen glowing in the window behind her, shadowing her silhouette, the blue light giving a demonic touch to her features and intensifying her coloration by means of complimentary contrast, and in the faint, refracted light of the Earth's star, she looked exquisitely terrifying.

The discarded blanket she'd sat on earlier, she carelessly stepped on, not bothering to pick them up or retrieve it or any of her other possessions as she turned to leave, the echo of her steps trailing off into the distance as she disappeared into the ships labyrinthine corridors –

Perhaps, she intended to pick them up when she was done on the surface, or believed that what she would do down there would erase all the significance they'd ever held for her.

Or maybe, some part of her had already known that she would never return at all.

She'd send her Peridot underling to retrieve her soon enough, but for now, the Jasper was gone, and Lapis was left here, lying on the holding cell's floor, thoroughly broken, used and violated, whatever fragile little hope she'd had when she departed hammered and smashed beyond all recognition.

And as it turned out, there _was_ one more thing that there was let for her to lose:

The high ground.

Much later, she would come curse herself for this instant and it would haunt her for much of the coming dark days, and she would flagellate herself with the doubt that maybe, that one moment of weakness, or the simple truth that she'd even dared to _feel_ spite or hate, or anything at all, meant that she could somehow all deserve all the black days that were yet to be released upon her, no better than the tormentors who forced her hand;

But in that moment, all the could think of were their proud, proud faces and their proud, proud words, all so certain of who they were and just where they belonged and that nothing could possibly disrupt their convictions, much as Lapis herself had been when she first embarked on this journey –

And she found herself wondering if they'd be quite as smug if _they_ were the ones who'd been stranded and trapped, how they'd fare if _they_ were the ones who were hurt and alone and stripped of everything, and completely at the mercy at forces beyond their control –

Would they renounce their oh-so-precious convictions to save themselves, or would they stubbornly cling to them until the end? Would they persist in ceaseless, pointless struggle until they croaked in the dirt, or would they fall to their knees begging when they couldn't take anymore? Would they renounce their beloved leaders, or throw away their miserable lives to sacrifice their lives onto their uncaring altars?

Oh, and what a sight it would be, to see their smug, confident faces contorted with disbelief and desperation, all their beauty tarnished, all their dignity sullied, their pitiful, broken bodies trembling with impotent rage.

And as Lapis Lazuli contemplated that thought, she wished defilement upon them;

May their ambitions devour them;

May this miserable planet swallow them all, all three of them.

They all deserved oblivion.

 _~Welcome down, to my planet hell~_

* * *

That's all, folks~

W00t, I actually finished something I really wanted to do, that's... motivating. Take _that_ , procrastination monkey~

There will be extensive end notes and a bit of a bonus chapter/scenes, but first, stay tuned for the epilogue (In which Peridot is stranded, and Malachite is homesick.)


End file.
